The most connected man in the country

Mike Tobin is outside one of his company's sites at the far end of Marsh Wall, next to a road peppered with manhole covers.

He said: "About 90 per cent or more of Britain's internet traffic passes through this building.

"Some of the servers are housed here and most of the traffic goes through here at one point or another."

The Telecity chief executive has just arrived from his other office, one of five in the Docklands area and eight in London. With a smile, he casually waves one of a clutch of cards in his pocket.

He said: "I've just got my top-secret clearance. It entitles me to any information on an infrequent basis.

"The internet is considered critical to the nation's activities. If it went down, you wouldn't be able to use IT telephony, mobiles or normal lines. There would be no emails and no Bloomberg feeds. There would be a lot of disruption."

This explains the level of security at the Sovereign House site. Employees must go through iris scanners on entry, and this building alone is spotted with 387 cameras. Sensors are positioned in each room to record changes in the air.

Mike said: "There are different levels of sensitivity. When it reaches the first level, it lets the people downstairs know something is going on. The second level activates an audible sound, and the third triggers a fine mist which fills the room for 30 seconds and is then sucked out again.

"It's made to deal with fires, but it's so fine the moisture doesn't damage the servers."

Mike Tobin joined Redbus Interhouse in 2002 and led a merger with Telecity in 2006. He credits the explosion of broadband for his company's rapid growth, which recently saw him win the Docklands Business Club's Businessperson of the Year award, sponsored by The Wharf.

He said of the early days: "It was a mess. I couldn't really screw it up any more.
"A successful business is aware of its stakeholders, and each of these people has different needs. I have to create a good environment for my staff, create value for our shareholders, and provide a good service for our customers and users.

"I do that by surrounding myself with people more intelligent than me and giving them freedom."

Telecity primarily hosts information which needs to be accessed quickly, such as the BBC's iPlayer video service. Companies such as AOL, Carphone Warehouse, BT, Vodaphone and Bloomberg place their servers onsite, and Telecity provides a controlled environment in which they can operate efficiently. Air conditioning is strictly monitored, and servers are locked behind gates secured by keys and number locks.

Space is also at a premium. Buildings in Docklands are at 90 per cent capacity, while the company has moved to open new sites in Acton, Stockholm and Milan, with a third Paris building due in December. Telecity will then boast 23 sites worldwide.

The development of smaller servers has increased the number which can be squeezed into a space, but increased the demand for power. The five Docklands buildings now require as much power as a city the size of Cambridge.

Mike said: "With that in mind, how can you be green? The answer is that the machines would still exist, but they would be under people's desks, operating inefficiently.

"A server rack generates the same amount of heat as two domestic ovens at full blast with the doors open. In Amsterdam, that heat is used to create hot water which is used 300 yards away in a hospital. Its white roof reduces the temperature as well."

Broadband is creating an increasingly internet-obsessed society. Last August, 27million people in the UK watched more than 3billion videos. The internet will be nearly four times bigger in 2013, and the equivalent of 10billion DVDs will cross the internet each month.

Mike said: "Like every new technology, we always massively overestimate uptake in the first 12 months and underestimate it in the next 10 years. At the start, there was basically no usage. But the internet has increased 50-fold since 2003.

"There are 8billion websites now. Youtube puts as much content online today as was on the entire internet in 2000.

"This is the non-virtual bit of the virtual economy. People aren't aware of the massive infrastructure that makes the internet happen."