An office building in downtown Los Angeles that is the distribution hub for most electronic communications between Asia and the United States has been bought by a Texas investment company, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Private equity firm Carlyle Group is expected to announce today that it has sold the One Wilshire building to Houston-based Hines Real Estate Investment Trust Inc. for $287 million.

The 31-story building at the eastern end of Wilshire Boulevard at Grand Avenue is one of the two largest switching hubs in the country, routinely routing billions of phone calls and other communications such as e-mails and World Wide Web pages per week, said Thomas M. Ray, managing director of Carlyle Group. Its counterpart on the East Coast is 60 Hudson St. in New York.

“One Wilshire is the dominant point of interconnection for communication traffic between Asia and North America,” Ray said. Data stream in on a submarine cable from Asia and are distributed from there while other data are routed in the opposite direction.

One Wilshire was built as a standard office building in 1966. After the telecommunications industry was deregulated in 1984, competitors started laying underground cable in downtown Los Angeles with a heavy concentration near Wilshire and Grand, Ray said.

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