© Mark Ollig
After learning his internet outage was caused by a squirrel chewing through a copper cable, Andrew Blum wanted to know more.
Blum, a published writer and a correspondent for Wired magazine began a two-year personal quest to learn, firsthand, where the other end of his home internet cable went.
He wanted to pull back the curtain and see how this cable connected to the physical world from his internet modem box.
“What would happen if you yanked the wire from the wall, and you started to follow it? Where would you go?” Blum pondered.
He followed the cable to a hole on an outside wall. From there, it ran into a plastic utility demarcation box on the side of his house.
The cable was strung 30 feet from the demarcation box to a nearby telephone pole.
He learned the cable went to his local internet service provider's location and connected with a fiber-optic cable from the 60 Street Hudson Building.
The 60 Street Hudson Building is a 24-story telecommunications building located in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City.
Blum obtained access into the building and saw hundreds of electronic devices; many were digital data-packet routers used by major internet service providers and social media networks.
Various internet and communication carriers’ fiber-optic network cables from the outside terminate in designated rooms hosting their transport equipment in the building.
The Minnesota equivalent of the 60 Street Hudson building is the Minnesota Technology Center in Minneapolis. It is also known as the 511 Building, a Midwest regional hub for Minnesota’s major telecommunication, internet, and data carriers.
Blum observed the yellow fiber-optic cables connected to data routers physically interfaced with the transmission network systems of the internet, data, and telecommunication service providers.
Tall metal cabinets contained the electronic network transport facilities utilizing synchronous optical networking protocols for sending and receiving data among service providers.
The 60 Street Hudson building is also the interconnection hub for many trans-Atlantic oceanic fiber-optic cables connecting North America with Europe and other parts of the world.
An undersea fiber-optic cable originates from inside a building called a landing station and usually is located along a seaside neighborhood.
A representative working for an internet company informed Blum of a location, date, and time where he could see firsthand an undersea fiber-optic cable brought onto shore from a specialized cable landing ship near a beach south of Lisbon, Portugal.
Blum traveled to Lisbon, arrived at the specified beach location in the early morning, and observed a fiber-optic cable landing ship approximately 1,500 feet from the shoreline.
Then, someone in a diving suit walked out of the water onto the shore, holding a green nylon rope used as a messenger line for pulling the fiber-optic cable onto the beach from the landing ship.
Andrew Blum heard the loud engine of a bulldozer driving along the shoreline to be used for pulling the messenger line attached to the fiber-optic cable.
The bulldozer pulled the messenger line and the needed length of the fiber-optic cable onto the shore.
The other end of the fiber-optic cable floated atop the water attached to buoys to position the line correctly.
The person in the diving suit went back into the water with a knife to cut off the buoys, allowing the fiber-optic cable to sink and rest on the ocean floor.
The typical diameter of an undersea cable is 1-inch, which is nearly the size of a garden hose.
Blum watched as workers used a hacksaw to cut the end of the fiber-optic cable pulled in from the ocean to be prepared for splicing to another fiber-optic cable placed in a trench from the coastal landing station.
I contacted Andrew Blum for a brief interview shortly after the book about his two-year adventure was published.
B&B: Andrew, you said some people envision the internet as a cloud-like image. 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 fiber-optic cable feeding it.
B&B: Some people believe the internet is connected across the planet using orbiting space satellites; however, we know undersea fiber-optic cables provide 99 percent of the service. What did you know about the global internet before you started your investigation?
AB: Even when I started, I knew it wasn’t connected by satellites. I’d read Neal Stephenson’s excellent piece in Wired, “Mother Earth Mother Board,” so I had a good understanding of the “tubes” under the ocean.
B&B: What surprised you the most during your two-year exploration of the physical side of the internet?
AB: How small the internet turned out to be, physically, and the list of its most important buildings is surprisingly short. The number of engineers involved in interconnecting its networks is also minimal.
“When you see these guys going at the cable with a hacksaw, you stop thinking about the internet as a cloud; it starts to seem like an incredibly physical thing,” said Blum.
Andrew Blum’s book, “Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet,” can be ordered through Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
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| Andrew Blum's internet modem box |
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| Undersea fiber-optic internet cable brought onshore from a fiber-optic cable landing ship |
