Telecommunications & Utilities

Austin provides a rich communications infrastructure that can carry enterprise information whether your firm has 20 employees or 20,000 employees. Whether your employees work at home, are on the road or at your premises, Austin provides a seamless communications network to ensure that your information reaches its destination across town or across the country.

True to Austin's reputation as a technology center, businesses can rely on sophisticated and reliable information technologies to maintain a competitive advantage. Over 1,000 technical professionals maintain a network spanning more than 130,000 miles of fiber in Austin's Silicon Hills.

Greater Austin enjoys one of the world's most advanced, robust, and redundant telecommunications networks. Unique characteristics include:

• Multiple national and regional fiber backbone providers, protected by SONET rings and Ethernet network architecture, including digital access control, connecting all 23 central offices in Austin. Fiber is virtually universal in all routes to customers. Fiber optic connections are available to most major buildings and industrial sites.
• Central offices are equipped with digital switches featuring the latest generic software, signaling system 7 control, and a full array of services throughout the metropolitan area, i.e., ISDN, frame relay, switched digital data, DSL, high band width, etc.
• The newest digital-age services such as Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) and Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) capability which is used to prioritize Internet traffic for avoidance of congestion and failures.
• Austin is home to AT&T Laboratories, the technology applications Research and Development arm of AT&T.
• A large pool of telecommunications professionals, knowledge workers, and experienced data center and call center workers is available in the Greater Austin Area.
• AT&T and Time Warner Telecom are the primary providers in the Austin area. However, numerous competitive local exchange carriers also provide services in the area.

High tech industries sensitive to fluctuations in power quality thrive in Austin. Area providers are experienced in providing specialized technical and engineering support to high tech-companies. Austin Energy, which serves a 421 square-mile area, has achieved outage duration and outage frequency rates that are among the best in the nation.

Local providers are primarily municipal governments or special water districts, with some areas served by other suppliers.

Sources of water in Central Texas are surface waters managed by the Lower Colorado River Authority, the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, and the Brazos River Authority and ground waters from the Edwards Aquifer and the Trinity Aquifer. Regional planning groups assuring water sustainability and reliability in Central Texas are the South Central Texas Regional Water Planning Group, the Lower Colorado Regional Water Planning Group, and the Brazos Water Planning Group.

The region's largest municipal supplier, the City of Austin Water Utility, meets the water needs of some of the region's largest industrial operations:

• The Austin Water Utility is committed to the highest quality level of water and wastewater service that meets and exceeds all State and Federal quality standards as well as reasonable customer expectations concerning cost, reliability, quality, and environmental sensitivity.
• The utility has extensive long-range water supply plans and has executed an agreement for a guaranteed water supply for the City's corporate limits and extraterritorial jurisdiction for the next 100 years.
• The utility supplies approximately 3 billion gallons of water annually to six significant water users, four of which are semiconductor manufacturers.