Dakota Carrier Network Opens New Building | Video

Jessica Roose | 7/30/2012

Two years ago, construction began on a 42,000 square foot building for the Dakota Carrier Network. On Monday, officials at the company, Governor Dalrymple and Senator Hoeven attended a ribbon cutting to commemorate the grand opening.

The company came to North Dakota in 1996, but say they`ve outgrown their old building. They add that this new one in north Bismarck will allow DCN to expand over the years.

It looks like a regular office building from the outside, but this highly secure facility provides a fiber optic based broadband network in the state for both government and commercial use. Senator John Hoeven worked with the company during his 10 years as governor and said the services they provide are critical to the state.

"DNC is making sure no matter where you live in North Dakota you`re hooked into the world wide web. Think how important that is for businesses. Think how important that is for families, whether you`re in a large community or small community or on the farm, you have access to the world."

The company has a variety of customers including providing network connectivity to emergency services and banks and it`s vital the facility stays online even during the worst of storms. The new facility has an inner core that will withstand winds up to 200 miles-per-hour, or equivalent to a F4 tornado.

"If something were to happen at their corporate headquarters. If they were hit by a tornado, their data would still be safe on our network," said Business Development Manager Seth Arndorfer.

If the power ever did go out, the facility can run on a back up generator for about five days and someday it may be able to go even longer.

"You can see we have another pad here. We`ve planned for growth in this building. We don`t want to have to move again because this is in the hardened core. We didn`t want to add on with concrete so we had another pad and we actually had the electrical engineers integrate it into our internal wiring," Arndorfer said.

And yes, they even have a plan on how to get another generator of this size inside when it`s needed.

DCN is still in the process of moving everything over from their old building. Because they`re trying to keep outages to about 15 seconds, it is anticipated that they won`t be fully online in the new facility until October.

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