by
Mark Ollig
It
all started when a squirrel chewed through a cable and disconnected his
Internet service.
This
incident led Andrew Blum (a published writer and a correspondent for Wired) to
begin a personal quest to learn, firsthand, where the other end of his Internet
cable went once it left his building.
He
wanted to pull back the curtain, and see for himself where this cable connected
to out in the physical world.
For
many of us, the physical Internet we see is a cable connecting to a small box
with blinking lights on it.
Blum,
along with many of us, has seen the famous Opte representation of the Internet;
an image resembling a spiraling, Milky Way galaxy.
This
image shows an oval-shaped, expansive cloud with seemingly countless, small,
colorful, brightly lit dots inside it. Each dot communicates with one another
via crisscrossing lines of light.
You
can see several Opte Internet images at: http://www.opte.org/maps.
The
Internet: a mysterious cloud. “We can never seem to grasp it in its totality,”
Blum said to the audience during his TED video presentation.
“What
would happen if you yanked the wire from the wall, and you started to follow
it? Where would you go?” pondered Blum.
He
wondered if the Internet was a place you could visit.
And
with that, Blum embarked on a two-year journey; visiting the places and people
that make up the physical Internet.
At
the 60 Street Hudson building in New York, Blum saw where the router of one
network, such as a Facebook, Google, or Comcast, was connected using a yellow
fiber-optic cable that traveled up into the ceiling, came back down, and then
connected into the router of another network.
“That’s
unequivocally physical,” Blum stated.
He
found the 60 Street Hudson building interesting because it is also home to
about six major communication networks serving fiber-optic cables traversing
under the oceans. These fiber-optic cables connect America with Europe, and
other parts of the world.
An
undersea fiber-optic cable usually originates from inside a building called a
landing station, which is inconspicuously located along a seaside neighborhood.
Blum
had correspondence with a person who worked for an undersea communications
company.
This
person told him of a location where he could go and watch a fiber-optic cable
being brought onto shore from a specialized cable landing ship.
The
location was a beach south of Lisbon, Portugal. Blum was there when at around 9
a.m., he saw a man in a diving suit walking out of the water holding a green
nylon rope. This rope was the fiber-optic cable’s messenger line, used to pull
the fiber-optic cable onto shore.
About
1,000 feet from shore, the cable landing ship, containing the last leg of the
fiber-optic cable, was seen by Blum, just as a bulldozer drove onto the beach.
This
bulldozer was used to pull the messenger line; which was attached to the
fiber-optic cable aboard the landing ship.
The
bulldozer finished pulling the messenger line onto shore, and with it, came
many feet of fiber-optic cable.
The
fiber-optic cable floated atop the water, as it was attached to buoys, which
positioned the cable in the right location.
The
man in the diving suit went back out into the water with a knife to cut off the
buoys in order to allow the fiber-optic cable to sink and rest on the ocean
floor.
Blum
displayed a picture to the audience of communication workers using a hacksaw to
cut open the end of the fiber-optic cable pulled in from the ocean. It was
being prepared for splicing to the fiber-optic cable that had been brought down
from the onshore landing station.
“When
you see these guys going at this cable with a hacksaw, you stop thinking about
the Internet as a cloud; it starts to seem like an incredibly physical thing,”
said Blum.
Yours
truly was able to chat with Andrew Blum.
Blum
has just written a book about his two-year adventure, and was kind enough to
answer some questions for me.
B&B:
Andrew, you said some people visually see the Internet as the cloud-like image
Opte has created. After two years of exploring and writing a book about the
physical side of the Internet, how do you see it now?
AB:
I now have a pretty clear image of its physical realities, particularly the
hubs closest to my home in Brooklyn. When a web page hangs, I often picture my
cable company’s router, and curse the traffic on the yellow fiberoptic cable
feeding it!
B&B:
Many people feel the Internet is connected world-wide via earth-orbiting
satellites; however, we know this not to be the case. What did you know about
this before you started your investigation?
AB:
No, even when I started, I knew it wasn’t connected by satellites. I’d read
Neal Stephenson’s awesome piece in Wired from 1998, “Mother Earth Mother
Board,” so I had a good starting understanding of the “tubes” under the ocean.
B&B:
Vinton Cerf has talked about an “interplanetary Internet.” What are your
thoughts about Earth linking its network with other planetary bodies?
AB:
I think that fits perfectly with the basic philosophical idea of the Internet:
a network of infinite networks!
B&B:
What surprised you, or stays in your mind the most during your two-year
exploration of the physical side of the Internet?
AB:
How small the Internet turned out to be, both physically – the list of its most
important buildings is surprisingly short – and culturally – the list of
network engineers actively involved with interconnecting networks is also
surprisingly short.
B&B:
Andrew, is there another technology you would like to someday investigate and
write about in the future?
AB:
Good question. I’ve been thinking a lot about that now, but I don’t yet have a
good answer.
I
would like to thank Andrew Blum for taking time to talk with me about his new
book, “Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet,” which can be ordered
at: http://www.tubesbook.net.
