Unlike the company's other buildings, the six-story, 500,000-square-foot structure is not intended to house people. Instead, it is being designed for machinery, the servers, routers and switches that are the physical underpinning of the rapidly growing electronic commerce being conducted on the Internet….It is a new type of property known in the industry as a telecom hotel, because it houses equipment belonging to many different telecommunications companies.

Although the proliferation of these "telecom hotels" can be a boon for landlords, others wonder if it's a good idea to fill up buildings with machines instead of people.

David Leatherwood of Portland, Ore.-based Enron Communications Inc. said his company chose to locate a facility in the former Tokai Bank building, now dubbed Telecom Center by its new owners, because it is less than half a block from One Wilshire.

"Our building is like an adjunct telecom hotel to One Wilshire," he said. "That's where all our fiber is going into, so we wanted to be close."