St. Cloud’s Downtown offers a tech-friendly location.
Bandwidth Redundancy Loop Grid

Drive your profits up by keeping costs downtown.

  • Talented workforce
  • Reasonable labor costs
  • Low cost of living
  • Attractive zoning options
  • Affordable real estate

St. Cloud awarded 2008 Most Livable City by LivCom
Small but mighty, and obviously attractive, the City of St. Cloud, Minnesota earned designation as the most livable city of its size in the US, and second only to Kladno, Czech Republic as the most livable city in the world.

St. Cloud is located in the heart of central Minnesota, less than one hour’s drive away from Minneapolis-St. Paul. It’s population of 68,000 swells to over 200,000 during the day due to it’s stature as a high growth, education, health care, retail, manufacturing and financial services regional center.

St. Cloud area businesses benefit from an abundance of technology companies.
To remain competitive in today’s new economy a business must leverage technology. Downtown St. Cloud has several advanced networking companies, web media companies, custom software development firms, and a data outsourcing center conveniently located within a few blocks of your business. This virtual team of competent technicians can provide your business the perfect blend of quality and cost advantage.

Dubbed “Minnesota’s Silicon Prairie” in the May 2007 Minnesota Real Estate Journal, as optimism grows in Downtown St. Cloud due to a recent influx of approximately 15 high-tech businesses in a 5-block area. ING Direct, the largest internet banking firm in the world, has expanded in the Downtown core.

St. Cloud is one of the nation’s “most-wired” markets.
A major regional Qwest communications hub located downtown along with several competing telecom companies gives a business located in Downtown St. Cloud an incredible Internet backbone capacity with a huge amount of long-haul fiber. The Downtown area has a complete technology infrastructure in place including fiber optic cable, SONET, OC48, as well as DSL, ATM exchanges, and T1 bandwidth technologies. These enterprise-grade services offer reliability and performance and can be scaled to meet any business need.
IngegraCharterXcel
Qwest Metro Optical Ethernet (QMOE)

The use of copper and fiber networks to provide native Ethernet service in a metropolitan area/wide area network (MAN/WAN) has been show to give greater service flexibility while simultaneously decreasing costs, as compared to carrying an equivalent bandwidth on traditional synchronous optical network (SONET)-based networks. In addition to being less expensive than granularity of service means that, unlike SONET, you can obtain precisely the bandwidth you need. In summary, Qwest Metro Optical Ethernet (QMOE) gives you the opportunity to gain cost-effective bandwidth with multiple locations or key vendor relationships in select metro areas. Read more…

Area businesses also enjoy a seemingly endless supply of knowledge workers.
Six area higher education institutes (College of Saint Benedicts, Saint John’s University, Saint Cloud Technical College, Rasmussen College, Minnesota School of Business and Saint Cloud State University) are continuously looking to area businesses to provide career opportunities to their students. From low-risk internships to highly-skilled technical workers, these institutions continuously provide an eager and competent labor pool to area businesses.

Computer learning courses are available to everyone.
Through Resource Training and Solutions, a local computer training organization, employees and executives can receive quality instruction in beginner-to-advanced computer classes. Custom courses and rental of the computer lab are available.

We encourage you to to find out what Downtown St. Cloud has to offer your business.

Your business would be in good company.
A sampling of some of the high tech businesses include:

Netgain
GeoComm
DMR
MicroBiologics
ebureau
ING Direct
W3i
Th!nkCreative Media Works

Science Initiative of Central Minnesota
The Science Initiative team is committed to helping science-based companies find the information and resources they need to determine if Central Minnesota is the right location for their planned new site or expansion. To learn more about this initiative, click here.

QMOE Description
QMOE service combines the power of Ethernet and optical technologies across MANS to provide low-cost, scalable and secure bandwidth. QMOE provides local area network (LAN)-to-LAN connectivity between two or more customer locations within a metro area, and is suitable for data applications that include data file transfer, Internet access, off-site data storage and access to hosting, outsourced mail and file server service, and outsourced application service. The service is also well suited to voice and video applications.

Features
Standout features of QMOE include the following:

  • Point-to-point and multipoint service configurations
  • Central office connectivity with SST, SHNS, GeoMax and colocations
  • Bandwidth options from 5 Mbps to 1Gbps
  • Secure and reliable service, with service level agreement (SLA) goals of up to 99.999% availability with quality of service (QoS)
  • Traffic not restricted to dedicated SONET bandwidth increments
  • A completely meshed native Ethernet network
  • QoS is an option that provides four ways to prioritize traffice and an SLA goal of 99.999% availability on the highest level
  • Multiple Ethernet virtual connections (EVCs) allows one port to support multiple EVCs
  • Protect Route physically separates the working and protect data links and provides an SLA goal of 99.99% availability

Benefits
QMOE offers you the following benefits:

  • Cost effective – QMOE bandwidth can be less expensive than traditional time division multiplexing (TDM) services. You have the potential to reduce your total cost of ownership by eliminating the need for specialized WAN support expertise, reducing the cost of WAN equipment with lower cost Ethernet switches and routers, as well as consolidating server/facilities.
  • Flexibility – scalable bandwidth increments let you pay only for what you need.
  • Productivity enhancing – may also increase your productivity by enabling virtual work groups across a metropolitan area (i.e., you gain connectivity with; for example, your suppliers).
  • Quick turnaround – easily upgradeable; your service can typically be up and runnign within four business days after service order and acceptance.
  • Reliability – service has a standard 99/9% SLA availability objective, which increeases to up to 99/999% with purchase of optional QoS, or 99.99% with optional Protect Route.

How it works
QMOE provides local area network Lan-to-LAN connectivity between two or more loations with a metro area. The QMOE solution is badsed on distributed Layer 2 switching and shared tranport data bandwidth. The local loop that extends to the customer premises can typically be provided via either fiber or copper facilities. Service is available in buildings serviced by disclosed wire centers.