Bell Canada: Bell Canada 250 Marquette Ave S

The facility at 250 South Marquette Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota (55401 USA) is a major data centre and carrier hub building, serving as a multi-tenant site that houses organizations such as Bell Canada, XO Communications, Cogent, Verizon, and others. Its strategic location in downtown Minneapolis gives it excellent connectivity to regional fiber networks, access to multiple carriers, and proximity to business, financial, and tech ecosystems in the Upper Midwest. The building is also known under the name “The Marq”, a Class A office building with significant technical space for data centre/colocation use.

⚙️ Facility Highlights

• Power Capacity: Approximately 4.5 MW of power capacity is available. 
• Raised‐floor Technical / Colocation Space: The facility includes raised-floor space for efficient airflow and cable management; anti-static floors are used for equipment protection.
• Redundancy & Cooling: Cooling infrastructure operates with N+1 redundancy; economization (air-side or water-side) is employed to improve energy efficiency. 
• Building Size & Architecture: The larger building (“The Marq”) is ~ 522,656 sqft with up to 37,000 sqft of technical/data center space available in parts. 

🔐 Security & Compliance

• Physical & Access Controls: There are 24/7 security staff; controlled access via key-card / biometric / similar authentication; secure loading docks; monitoring with CCTV. 
• Environmental & Fire Safety: Fire suppression (pre-action systems, dry pipe sprinklers, possibly gas suppression in certain provider-spaces); raised floors; humidity/temperature monitoring; water leak monitoring in cooling systems. 
• Compliance Certifications: XO Communications facility in this building is audited under SSAE 16 / SOC-3; supports compliance standards including HIPAA, PCI, SOX 404. 

🌐 Connectivity & Carrier Access

• Carrier-Neutral / Multiple Providers: The building hosts many carriers: Bell Canada, XO, Cogent, Lumen, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, among others. Carrier-neutral access is available to clients. 
• Fiber Entry & Network Diversity: Multiple fiber providers are present in building; built for diverse fiber paths. 
• Internet Exchange & Interconnection Options: Supports dark fiber, lit services; in-building interconnection, cross-connects; strong IP backbone access via Cogent, XO, Bell, etc. 

💼 Who It Serves

• Enterprises needing high-availability colocation for critical infrastructure.
• Carriers and network service providers who require carrier hotel / interconnection functions.
• Companies subject to regulatory or compliance mandates (healthcare, finance, legal) needing SSAE 16/SOC, PCI, HIPAA compliance. 
• Cloud providers, managed service providers, content delivery networks that need dense connectivity and proximity to a rich fiber and carrier ecosystem.
• Organizations with disaster recovery, backup, or hybrid cloud strategies in the Upper Midwest seeking low-latency access, redundancy and diverse network paths.