Fiber Park Forms at Pinnacle Point

Northwest Arkansas already has a fiber park. It’s just not owned by a municipality.

Despite a decade-long effort by the city of Fayetteville to build its own hot-wired office complex, it only took a couple of years for a group of private investors to turn their Pinnacle Point development into a mountain of connectivity. Tenants of the posh office and retail development say Pinnacle Point serves as the two-county area’s de facto fiber park.

Although it was primarily designed to provide Class “A” office space for corporate vendors and local professionals, the development’s investors made giving clients ample bandwidth a priority. The result is a 68-acre technology hub that has more fiber than oat bran.

“Why would a company that needs high bandwidth want to be anywhere else?” asked Chris Maddox, CEO of technology do-it-all VeriSource Inc. His firm leases 6,500 SF at Pinnacle Point.

“My guess is they wouldn’t,” Maddox said.

In February, Alltel Corp. of Little Rock lit the candle for its Optical Cable 192 (OC192). The buried fiber backbone circles west from Little Rock along Interstate 40, up Interstate 540 past Pinnacle Point and through southeast Missouri before turning south down U.S. Highway 65, heading through Harrison, Conway and then back to the corporate office.

The loop, which carries 10 gigabyte connectivity, has a remote switching node set up at Pinnacle Point near I-540’s intersection with Arkansas Highway 94. That allows for a major confluence of channels which increases the speed and reliability of high-data-rate services at the development, said Mike O’Bryan, Alltel’s manager of major account sales for Western Arkansas.

There’s also an OC 48 spur with 2.5 gigabytes of bandwidth that runs off the Alltel backbone right into Pinnacle Point. One T1 line has 1.5 gigabytes of connectivity.

O’Bryan said the decision by Pinnacle Point’s developers — who include Collins Haynes of Haynes & Associates Ltd. and Bill Schwyhart of Hart BMW/Volkswagen — to provide their customers with super high bandwidth has made that area unrivaled locally in connectivity capability.

And if the intersection of I-540 and Arkansas 94 has become the high-tech haven for upscale business offices, Alltel’s switch room in the Tower at Pinnacle Point is ground zero.

“We view the corridor from Pleasant Grove Road up through Bentonville as the commercial epicenter of Northwest Arkansas,” O’Bryan said. “This is where everything that’s not already here is coming. Our plan is to put fiber into every office along the way.

“We’ll spend well in excess of $5 million here during the next five years just to run fiber off our backbone along I-540 into office parks and other developments. The business community is gravitating toward this area.”

Alltel, which employs 50 people in Northwest Arkansas, has more than 100,000 wireless and fiber customers in Northwest Arkansas. Its monthly revenue from the market that runs from south of Fort Smith to Bella Vista is about $7 million. The firm has 16 commercial accounts at Pinnacle Point.

“Our research tells us that businesses moving into this area need end-to-end digital service and bandwidth,” O’Bryan said.

“There is nothing faster than Pinnacle Point in the two-county area. We just hope to continue to be the technology vendor of choice for firms in this community.”