by Andrew Blum
“That’s only where we are today,” Westesson said. “The next step will be to start using one-hundred-gigabit-per-second links, where an individual fiber is transmitting at a rate of one hundred billion bits per second.” They’d been testing them already. Gig is a word I encountered nearly every day, but it meant something different to try to count each bit separately.
Everything Westesson had been saying was about the “thickness” of the tubes: how much data is moving through the machine each second. But I was also interested in the corollary: What was the velocity of a single bit? This turned out to be something of a sore point. “Some of our customers are looking at how long it takes for a packet to get switched through a router. It tends to be in the microsecond range, which is one-millionth of a second,” Westesson said. But compared with the amount of time it takes a bit to cross the continental United States, for example, that time spent crossing the router was an eternity. It was like walking ten minutes to the post office only to wait in line for seven days, around the clock. Brocade’s machines, powerful though they may be, were the traffic-clogged cities on a journey across the open net. A millionth of a second was painfully slow, if that’s possible to conceive.
According to the laws of physics, an unimpeded bit should be able to cross the three-foot cube router in five-billionths of a second, or five nanoseconds. Westesson showed me the math, jotting the numbers down on paper with a mechanical pencil: the speed of light through fiber divided by the size of the router. Then he checked his math using a calculator program on a nearby computer—which was kind of funny in itself, because of all the things we think about our computers being able to do, this kind of math was one of the last. He counted off the zeros on the screen. “This point is the millisecond … this point is the microsecond … and this one is usually expressed as nanoseconds, or billionths of a second.” I mulled all the zeros on the screen for a moment. And when I looked up, everything was different. The cars rushing by outside on Highway 87 seemed filled with millions of computational processes per second—their radios, cell phones, watches, and GPSs buzzing inside of them. Everything around me looked alive in a new way: the desktop PCs, the LCD projector, the door locks, the fire alarms, and the desk lamps. The room had a watercooler with a green LED—and a circuit board inside! The air itself seemed electric, charged with billions of logical decisions per second. Everything in contemporary life is based on these processes, on this math. Only deep in the woods can we manage to turn them off, and then not entirely. Otherwise, in the city—forget it. The networked systems are everywhere: cell phones, streetlights, parking meters, ovens, hearing aids, light switches. But all invisible. To see it you had to imagine it, and in that moment I could.
But at this point Westesson was late for his next meeting, and becoming a little restless. I had the sense he wasn’t late often. He walked me to the elevator. “Well, we’ve only just scratched the barest surface,” he said. But it seemed we had actually gone quite far. In his essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson crosses “a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky.” And yet even that ho-hum journey brings him “a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.... I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all.” On a journey to the center of the Internet my bare common turned out to be the router lab. And what I saw was not the essence of the Internet but its quintessence—not the tubes, but the light.
And yet, where did that get me? Sitting on a bench outside taking notes, I wondered if this revelation demeaned my pilgrimage. After all, it came not at the building scale or even at the city scale, but at the nano scale. What if the Internet couldn’t properly be understood as places, but was really better thought of as math made manifest; not hard, physical tubes, but ineffable, ethereal numbers? But by then it was time to get to the airport and I remembered that for all the constantly advancing miracles of silicon, the planet itself remains unassailable, along with the speed of light and the human desire to be connected. The bandwidth might expand, but California and New York and London do not get any closer together—all of which was painfully obvious on the long flight home to New York. The world is still large. In the taxi from JFK, inching through the familiar city streets, I was struck by how much of it there was. If the Internet was made of light, then what was all this other stuff—filling buildings, even whole neighborhoods, the whole glittering expanse of the skyline at night?
In December 2010, Google announced the purchase of 111 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan for $1.9 billion, making it the largest US real estate transaction of the year. It’s a massive building, with nearly three million square feet of space spread across an entire city block, and it had been Google’s New York City headquarters since 2006. Google executives said the company needed the building to accommodate the expanding number of employees in the city. They already had two thousand people working there and were hiring like crazy. Owning the building outright would give them the flexibility they needed in the long term.
But Internet infrastructure people raised their eyebrows at that explanation. In addition to being prime office space in a popular neighborhood, 111 Eighth also happens to be among the most important network meeting points in the world, and certainly among the top three in New York. Google buying it was a little like American Airlines buying LaGuardia Airport—and claiming it only wanted it for the parking garage. Among many other companies, Equinix leased fifty-five thousand square feet of space in the building. But unlike in Ashburn or Palo Alto, so did many other data center companies and individual networks. At “one-eleven,” as everyone calls it, the building itself was the exchange, with fiber running between individually leased spaces in complexly overlapping ways.
But what caught my eye about Google’s purchase was a detail in a newspaper article, meant to explain Google’s interest: 111 sat atop something called the “the Ninth Avenue fiber highway.” Put that way, it sounded like the Hudson River, or maybe the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. But when I started asking around, it turned out to not really be a thing, only a creative invention of real estate agents. Not that there wasn’t a lot of fiber—there was tons. Just that it wasn’t only under Ninth Avenue. New York City was filled with “fiber highways.”
Walking around the city in my day-to-day life, I was captivated by the idea of the light pulsing beneath the streets. Climbing down the steps into the subway, I’d imagine the red lights sticking out of the concrete decking. This was the municipal corollary to what was going on inside the router. But it wasn’t the realm of egghead engineers, their glasses reflecting with strings of numbers. It was about thick bundles of cable and dirty streets—an even heavier reality. I started to wonder just how that light got in the ground.
Hugh O’Kane Electric Company was founded in 1946 to maintain printing presses for publishers, but it had since evolved to become New York’s dominant independent fiber-optic contractor. “We’ve got plenty of tubes around here,” Victoria O’Kane, a granddaughter of the founders, said when I called. I wanted to actually see the fiber being put under the streets—the newest piece of Internet. Hugh O’Kane’s crews did that practically every night. So one winter evening I rode the subway twenty minutes from home to a rendezvous on a downtown street corner with a white truck painted with lightning bolts.
On its bed was a spool of black cable the size of a Volkswagen. It was parked beside a manhole forged with the initials “ECS,” short for Empire City Subway. But the “Subway” name wasn’t what you might think. Empire City predated New York’s “subway” transit system. Since 1891 ECS—now a wholly owned subsidiary of Verizon—had owned the franchise to build and maintain an underground system of conduits, which it offered for lease at published rates that haven’t changed in a quarter century: a four-inch-diameter conduit will cost you $0.0924 per foot per month, while a two-inch one can be had for only $0.0578 a foot. Going the length of Manhattan will cost you about $4,000 a month—if there’s space left in the conduits.
That evening, Br
ian Seales and Eddie Diaz, both members of Local Three, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, were to install twelve hundred feet of new fiber under the streets, threading it through Empire City’s existing tubes. The two worked for Hugh O’Kane, but the cable itself was owned by a company called Lightower and was extra thick: 288 individual fibers shoehorned into a package the diameter of a garden hose.
As they do most nights, Seales and Diaz left the garage in the Bronx at seven P.M. and “popped” the manhole at eight, heaving its 150-pound cover with steel hooks—together, as per union rules. The asphalt under my feet reverberated with the crash. The opened hole emitted a faint vapor that drifted across the shiny streets, glistening with the first light snowflakes of what would soon turn into a big storm. I was freezing. Seales was unbothered, his flannel shirt collar open. “I don’t care how hard it snows, you can’t get wet in a manhole,” he said.
Toes to the curb, I leaned forward and looked inside the hole. There was no visible bottom, only an abyss of twisted cables. To give themselves more room to work, Diaz and Seales pulled out two big coil cases, rubber cans the size of Labradors marked “AT&T” and “Verizon,” and laid them out on Broadway. They looked like giant squid under the streetlights, with their gray bodies dangling black cables. Some holes are so stuffed with cables that the cover pops right up, like snakes coming out of a can. The manhole was hard up against the security perimeter around the New York Stock Exchange. Bankers hustled by us, headed home from work. A cop inside a bulletproof hut cast a knowing eye in our direction. We were part of the nighttime rhythms of the city; after a day of moving money, the time had come to build and rebuild the city’s more tangible pieces.
Seales had been working the streets of New York for Hugh O’Kane for sixteen years; for the eighteen years before that, he slung copper cables along the city’s subway tracks. He looked like George Washington, with silver hair and a pointy nose. Diaz was younger and stockier, with dark hair and a twitchy face. On St. Patrick’s Day, Seales calls him Eddie O’Diaz. Both wore their walkie-talkies clipped to the shoulder straps of their work bibs; to keep them from screeching when they stood too close to each other, each covered the speaker with his hand whenever his partner spoke, as if holding his hand to his heart.
The cable on the truck was a single continuous ribbon of fibers. An engineer sitting at a desk had drawn out the route on a big map of the neighborhood, indicating the path of the cable with a thick red line, and each manhole it traversed with a cowlick. In that form, there was nothing electronic about it. These were pure optical pathways, the least common denominator of the Internet. A fiber is a fiber—all they had to do was run it across the city.
The length being installed that night was what’s known as a “lateral”: a crosstown link connecting Lightower’s two existing network spines, one heading up Broad Street and the other, Trinity Place. The immediate goal was to get 55 Broadway “on net” at the request of a single customer with (it seemed) heavy-duty data needs. Eventually this new stretch of fiber would also pick up additional customers along its path. It worked according to an incontrovertible physical truth: a pulse of light goes in one end and comes out the other. There is plenty of magic in the light itself—the rhythm and wavelength of its pulses determine the amount of data that can be transmitted at a time, which is in turn dependent on the machines installed on each end. But none of that changes the need for a continuous path. Individual strands of fiber can be spliced together end to end by melting the tips, like candles—but that process is delicate and time-consuming. The path of least resistance is unbroken. Hopefully.
The week before, Seales and Diaz had prepped the route. Using a fiberglass rod that folds into sections like a collapsible cane, they shoved a yellow nylon rope through the conduits and tied it off in each manhole along the way. Then they “dressed” the manholes, laying plastic tubing across each chasm to guide the cable. Tonight, they would pull the cable—twelve hundred feet total, just shy of a quarter mile—under the streets using the yellow rope. They’d start in the middle of the route, which also happened to be its highest point, the geologic spine of the island of Manhattan, Broadway.
Two other trucks would work with them, feeding the cable through the conduits, and pulling it out. When they were in position, Diaz hopped into the manhole. He was the “assist,” the middle man in the bucket brigade. On the street, Seales wrapped the yellow leader rope around the truck’s winch, and then fed the end down to Diaz. The cable would come out of the manhole, loop around the winch, and then go back in on its way to the next stop, where they would repeat the process. The truck idled heavily, its orange highway arrow illuminating the wet streets against the cycle of the traffic lights. When the call came over the radio—“Ready on the winch. GO GO GO”—Seales swung the broomstick-sized lever on the back of the truck and propped it in place with a plank. As the cable slid by, Seales greased it with a yellowish compound they call the “soap,” which he sloshed out of a bucket with his hands. “Like K-Y, Astroglide, whatever,” Seales said. “This stuff is dirty. It starts out white.”
Diaz yelled up from the hole. “A couple Fridays ago, one of those nights it was in the teens, the shit was freezing on our gloves, on the wheel, it was cracking off the fiber as it was coming out. That was a night I wished I stayed in school. But I enjoy my job. I’m claustrophobic. I can’t be in a building.”
Up the block, the nose of the cable began to come out of the ground beside the other truck, half pulled and half pushed by Seales’s winch. The guys there walked it into position with steady, rhythmic steps, crossing their legs and hinging their arms like doo-wop singers. As if doing a quarter-time square dance in the street, they laid the cable on top of itself in a figure-eight pattern. It looked like a woven basket the size of a hot tub.
“Some of these conduit runs are eighty or a hundred years old,” Seales said. “They were put in when the city was built. Tonight we’re in 2.5-inch iron ducts, which are very old, but down below there are square terra-cotta ducts that bricklayers put in in two-foot sections.” The manholes are sometimes ornate, with arched spans. Seales can tell you a story about each one—like the “six-header” across from 32 Avenue of the Americas that’s always filled with water. The morning of September 11, he was supposed to be pulling cable into the Twin Towers. Instead, he was in the basement of 75 Broad Street, pulling cable from them. It was his lucky choice. “The night before, I looked at the map, I looked at the route, and I said, ‘If we get stuck late we’re going to be out on the West Side Highway in the morning and the DOT is going to throw us off.’ ” So he turned the route around. When the Towers fell, “when all the shit was going on,” he was on the other end of the cable, and his guys were safe nearby.
We rode in the truck to the next spot, two blocks away, bouncing leisurely up the middle of the empty street while the conduit underneath followed its own lopsided path. Diaz jumped out, and Seales positioned the truck so that its winch was directly over the manhole, ready to pull the fiber through. Its massive tire inched closer to the edge, and closer still, until I was sure he was going to fall in. “He’s not going in there—that’s a double wheel,” Diaz assured. The union inspector was looking at his paperwork in the beam of the truck’s headlights, and, as a gag, Seales tapped him gently with the bumper of his two-ton truck, like a priest giving communion. The inspector threw his papers into the air. Two women in high-heeled boots passed. “Whatta I got you for?” Diaz teased the inspector. “Not to watch out for me. That’s two of them that went by.”
When everyone was ready, the radio squawked: “GO GO GO.”
Diaz yelled back: “GO GO GO.” The winch ran smoothly for a few moments until the yellow rope snapped off the wheel. “Oh!” Diaz said. “That’s not good.” Work stopped as they searched for the problem. Somewhere under the street the cable had snagged.
“I prepped the route myself,” Seales said in his defense. “I’ve worked these routes multiple times, with multiple c
ustomers.” The problem turned out to be a “bareback” section—meaning the cable moved freely, rather than inside conduit or innerduct. The joint between the fiber and yellow rope—known as the “nose”—had snagged. Diaz freed it up and called back over the radio, “GO GO GO.” As the cable again slid by, Seales squinted through reading glasses to read the length, marked on the cable every two feet. “These fucking numbers are getting littler and littler,” he said. The other truck, impatient to finish the night, sped up the winch, and Seales complained over the radio. “Slow it down slow it down.” Getting no response, he yelled up the block. “Yo-HOOO! Nice and easy.”
The cable pulled taut. Diaz coiled up an extra sixty feet, lassoed it with electrical tape, and banded it to the wall of the manhole—enough slack for the “splice truck” that would soon come to extract a couple fibers out of the cable and fuse them to another fiber coming out of the adjacent building. Seales stacked the orange cones, folded the steel safety gate that surrounded the manhole, and hooked the manhole cover back into place. It clanged, then thudded. “Another successful night,” Seales said.