by Andrew Blum
Late that afternoon I walked down to the beach where the old telegraph hut was maintained by the museum and opened up for visitors on good beach days. The sun was setting against the cliffs, and there were only a few couples staring out at the water. High up on the beach was a worn-out sign that said TELEPHONE CABLE, as a warning for passing boats. I hiked up a steep staircase built into the rocks to a path along the cliffs. A fishing boat passed far below, a speck smaller than my fingernail. Way out at sea, a big tanker steamed toward the Channel. The ocean was a flat steel-blue carpet stretching to the horizon, an image of infinity. I tried to picture the cables on the ocean floor, in their last few feet before landfall. In the museum’s gift shop I’d bought a small sample of actual cable, mounted in a vitrine the size of my thumb. The cable’s plastic casing was cut away to reveal the power-conducting copper tube and the fibers within. It was smaller in diameter than a quarter—but went on forever. The whole thing was simultaneously accessible and inaccessible, easy to grasp in one dimension but hardly imaginable in the other. It was like the ocean itself: the biggest thing on earth, yet traversable by plane in a day or electronically in an instant. How strange to be reminded while looking for the Internet, so often rhapsodized as making the world smaller, just how big the world is. The network hadn’t erased distance, but left its streaks visible, as if on a just-cleaned blackboard.
Walking back toward the village, I saw a manhole with the word ductile forged into it. As I approached the beach parking lot, there were more manholes and then a little compound of equipment surrounded by a wood fence, nestled in the reeds. It hummed. Sprouting out of a drainage ditch were huge prehistoric stalks of Gunnera, or giant rhubarb, each one bigger than a man—as if their growth were nurtured from below by the light passing beneath them.
That night at the B&B, I Skyped with my wife in New York, about the drawings our daughter made at day care, the mess the dog made, the man who was coming to fix the leak. Unlike a phone call, our conversation went over the Internet; it was free and crystal clear, composed of something like 128,000 bits each second. Afterward, out of curiosity, I ran a traceroute to see if I could discern which way they had all gone. The path went back to London—before doubling back through here to New York. The B&B was perched nearly on top of the road, and beneath the road was an umbilical connecting the United States and Europe. But it flew right by without stopping, like the jetliners high above. When I turned out the light, the valley was so quiet that my ears rang.
The next morning, the Global Crossing station manager, Jol Paling, met me at the B&B and I followed him in my car toward the landing stations. Immediately out of the valley we came upon what amounted to a High Street of the undersea cable world—a half-dozen stations lined up along the road. The first was disguised as a stone house and would have been unrecognizable as a landing station at all if it weren’t for the heavy automatic gate in front. Next came a huge gymnasium of a building with a broadly curving roof and playful porthole-like blue vents in the walls. It belonged to the system known as FLAG and served as the hinge of two cables that—like Tata’s—stretched west to New York and east all the way to Japan. The locals called the place “Skewjack,” after the surfers’ camping ground that used to be on the site. Paling then led me into a narrow lane towered over by tall hedgerows. We had to squeeze to the left to let a tractor, loaded with hay, pass by. At a bend in the lane was a tan building with corrugated concrete walls, a hideous brutalist bunker. A NO TRESPASSING sign indicated that this station belonged to BT. Later I learned that it was designed according to off-the-shelf Cold War–era plans that presumed it would be underground. But when the Cornish granite proved too tough, BT put it aboveground instead. It looked ready for a war—the most menacing of the group.
At the crest of a hill I finally caught a glimpse over the hedgerows and saw pasture in all directions, dotted with an unlikely skyline of satellite dishes, mostly backup communication for the landing stations. We passed through a small suburban hamlet, and then the lane widened into a yard. A farmer in tall rubber boots had just pulled a red Land Rover out of a garage filled with tractors. His border collie raised his tail at me. On a wooden fence was a washed-out white sign with black letters that said WHITESANDS CABLE STATION. I followed Paling up the long driveway, with a potato field on one side and more pasture on the other. Dairy cows stuck their heads over the hedges, as if in the stocks. The farmer next door had a fire roaring in a steel drum, mixing the smell of peat smoke in with the manure. We thumped over a cattle grate and into the landing station’s small parking lot. It had the shape of a house but was overscaled, like in a Texas suburb. Its exterior walls were faced in rough-hewn blocks of granite—at the request of the county planning commission—and there were green steel shutters. Beneath the eaves was a glass plaque that said ATLANTIC CROSSING. 1998. A GLOBAL CROSSING PROJECT.
Inside, rain slickers hung beside the doorway. The place smelled not unpleasantly of wet dog. Tia, a hefty spaniel, reclined in the corner. With its mismatched furniture, lime-green walls, maroon carpets, and a dropped ceiling, it had the feel of a technical shop rather than a slick high-tech command center. Giveaway maps from cable manufacturers were tacked to the wall. An old Global Crossing poster said “One Planet. One Network.” There was a cramped lobby, and a few private offices overlooking an idyllic Cornish scene of cows and emerald earth. The sound of a football game emanated from a television in the kitchen.
Paling had grown up in the area and had been with Global Crossing since 2000. Pushing forty, he was a big guy, more than six feet, with small blue eyes and a quiet face. He wore jeans, a stylish cardigan, and black skater shoes. If the Internet exchange guys tended toward the nerdy, most at home behind their screens, the undersea cable people were more likely to be the type who wouldn’t hesitate walking into a sailors’ bar in a foreign port. And indeed, Paling started out with BT in London, then spent time at sea laying and repairing cables, before returning to Cornwall to raise a family. His father had been “F1” with Cable & Wireless—the highest designation for a foreign officer—and had trained in Porthcurno. As a boy, Paling moved with his family among foreign stations, from Bermuda to Bahrain, the Gambia to Nigeria.
At Global Crossing, Paling wasn’t only in charge of this station but of the field engineering for the entire undersea network, which included the link across the Atlantic, as well as major cables that connected the United States with South America, looping down both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Paling’s eyes were bloodshot from a late night supervising, via conference call, equipment repairs on the link between Tijuana, Mexico, and Esterillos, Costa Rica. He knew the guys on the other end of the line well. His closest colleagues were on the other side of the world—which was also often the other end of the cable. This was typical. A cable across the ocean works like a single machine, with the equipment on one coast intricately linked with the equipment on the other. In the old days each cable would have an “order wire,” a telephone headset labeled with the name of the city on the other end, providing a direct communications link. Today, the order wire has mostly been subsumed into the usual corporation communication system, although on an earlier visit I’d made to a cable station near Halifax, in Canada, I saw its progenitor in action. When I arrived in the morning a few minutes before the station manager, his colleagues on the other end of the cable—in Ireland—answered the doorbell and opened the gate remotely. Their systems were linked.
Ushering me into his office, Paling tossed his keys on the desk, beside a remote control yellow submarine, the size of a football. “For repairs,” he said, nodding at it. Not really—it was his son’s toy. We walked down the hall and into a room with wires strung overhead, racks of equipment arranged in narrow aisles, and the familiar roar of hot computer exhaust and blowing air conditioners. Paling led me straight to the far corner. A black cable came out of the floor and was attached with steel clamps to a heavy-duty frame set a few inches from the wall. It had been manufactured in New Hamps
hire. Over the course of a long passage through a series of machines worthy of Rube Goldberg, eight individual strands of fiber were woven with layers of rubber, plastic, copper, and steel. The cable was then spooled into steel trays the size of merry-go-rounds, like something stolen from Richard Serra’s storehouse. A ship tied up to the factory’s pier on the Piscataqua River, and the entire multithousand-mile length of cable was fed through a quarter-mile-long catwalk down to the water, into three cylindrical tanks in the hull. Out at sea, the ship paid the cable out its stern along a precisely planned path from a beach in Long Island across the ocean to the sweeping arc of Whitesand Bay, a mile or so from here. Then it ran beneath the cows to the side of this large house, crossed the foundation, and popped up here. In its last foot, it had a label: AC-1 CABLE TO USA. For Paling, this was the plaque near his desk. For me, it was among the most amazing directional signs I’d ever seen. It pointed the way home, along a path that was physically utterly inaccessible—but that I’d in a way followed thousands of times before. “That’s the cable going to the US,” Paling said. The physical Internet couldn’t get much more literal.
Having followed it across the ocean, I followed it a little farther, across the station. Paling showed me the PFE, or “Power Feed Equipment,” a white box the size of a refrigerator that sent four thousand volts through the cable’s copper shielding, to power the undersea repeaters that amplified the light signals. The companion machine on the other end of the cable, in Long Island, was adjusted to the same voltage, so that the flows of electrons met in the middle of the ocean and used the earth itself as a ground. “We’re negative current, they’re positive current,” Paling said. It was a one-way flow of power, a simultaneous pushing and pulling.
The light through the cable was emitted (and received) from another bank of refrigerator-like machines, lined up in a row nearby. Paling found a spare length of yellow optical cable and plugged it into the “monitor” port of one of the machines, harmlessly tapping into the inbound light signal of one of the fibers. Then he plugged the other end of the cable into an optical spectrum analyzer—a desktop machine that looked like a Betamax, with a screen showing the waveforms of light, like on an EKG machine. “I like to think of it like a big jelly,” he said about what was on the screen. “If you push that bit down”—he pointed to one of the waves—“then these all will go up. It’s very much a case of playing around and trying to get that piece of jelly so each of the waves is at their best power.” The technology was known as “dense wavelength division multiplexing.” It allowed many wavelengths, or colors, of light to pass simultaneously through a single fiber. Each strand of fiber can be “filled up” with dozens of waves—each of which carries ten, twenty, or even forty gigabits per second of data. One of Paling’s jobs was to tune the lasers to fit in more wavelengths, like a harmonizing chord, getting each one right so they all work well together.
Theoretically this can be done from anywhere, but Paling liked to be beside the machine, seeing the light with the analyzer. Making the process occasionally more difficult, any movement of the cable at the bottom of the ocean can change the way the waves move through the fiber, potentially knocking the whole arrangement out of whack, like static on an old TV. Once Paling had everything adjusted, he’d put the cable on a “confidence trial,” generating artificial traffic to send through the fiber, and then looping that traffic, “backwards and forwards from here to America thirty times, or whatever.” Things moved fast. The day I was there, one of the fiber pairs was “decommissioned” in preparation for an upgrade. New equipment was going to squeeze more twenty-gigabit waves into it, increasing the capacity of the whole cable.
“So the fiber’s actually dark?” I asked.
“It’s not dark, no,” Paling said. “We call it ‘dim.’ There is power on those amplifiers. They are putting out ASE”—amplified spontaneous emission. “Noise. If you put a meter on there, you’d see light. But there’s no band noise. It’s only just background noise.” A flickering.
As Paling explained all this, he absentmindedly flipped open a protective plastic shield and tapped his finger against one of the “lit” fibers. All across Europe—if not the whole Eastern Hemisphere—there were millions and millions of strands of fiber. They merged and merged, again and again, emerging out of Telehouse in a thick bundle, then heading here. The final merge could be read in the yellow cables plugged into the front of this machine: many fibers went in, but ultimately only four came out. It was these four that would cross the ocean. They were the thickest veins at the end of a continent of capillaries—in terms of what they contained, but certainly not their physical size. It was just before noon. The European markets were open, but New York was still waking up. Paling’s lips were moving, but all I could concentrate on was his finger tapping on the cable. Short of renting a submarine, this was as close as I was going to get to a physical transatlantic link.
Our final stop was back across the hall. We’d followed the cable from where it came out of the dirt to the major subsea equipment. Now we were looking at the “backhaul,” the links from the station to the rest of England. One rack was labeled SLOUGH, a bland London suburb, not far from Heathrow, where Equinix had its biggest UK data center (and the original version of The Office is set). The one next to it was labeled DOCKLANDS. Whatever the size of the world, not for the first time, I thought to myself how small the Internet itself could seem.
Later that afternoon, after Paling had gotten back to work and we’d said our good-byes, I drove out to Land’s End. There’s a theme park there with a fake medieval street, but it was past the season and almost everything was closed up, except for a famous photo concession near the edge of the cliff, looking out over the ocean. For fifteen quid, you chose letters to spell out the name of your hometown and slid them into one of those signs that point to far-off places and list their distances. The photographer in a thick wool sweater snapped your picture, and a few weeks later the print arrived in the mail. Two of the destinations on the sign were permanent: John O’Groats, the most northerly place on mainland Britain (874 miles), and New York (3,147 miles). I figured since New York was already there I could ask for a different place and thought, what the hell: Would he mind if I put “The Internet” up there, and call it two miles away? For fifteen quid he said he didn’t mind at all, and he knew exactly why I’d asked. He knew the cables well. He’d watched the ships come by the water below. After my official shot, he offered to take an extra one with my phone.
Back in the warmth of the car, I emailed the picture to a few people in New York. I couldn’t help but think what that meant: the connection with the nearby cell tower, the backhaul to the Docklands, the U-turn to Cornwall, the quick pass through the cable landing station, the long journey to Long Island, into 60 Hudson, and then to my own email server in Lower Manhattan, before splattering out to its recipients. I knew these physical paths existed. But I also knew the Internet was still wily, diverse, multitudinous. I couldn’t say which path that photo went; it could just as easily have gone through the big Tata cable, which lands farther up the coast. The movement of a single clump of data was difficult to nail down, but that didn’t make the particularities along its path any less real. I was struck again by this challenge of catching lighting in a bottle—of nailing the Internet down, if only for a minute. There was still this gap between the physical and the virtual, the abstract of information and the damp breeze off the sea.
It took me a few months, but back in New York I eventually found a free afternoon to drive out to the beach and look for the other end of Atlantic Crossing-1. I decided not to call ahead. Paling had been a great host in Cornwall, and it felt like overkill to request to see yet another landing station—much less the matched pair. The town of Shirley on Long Island was AC-1’s officially listed landing point, but that left a fairly wide swath of beach where it could actually be. My wife and daughter came along, and they humored me as I nosed around at the edge of the parking lot of a public beac
h, kicking sand around like a scavenger. I eventually found a weather-beaten plastic post with a warning about a buried fiber-optic cable—but I couldn’t be sure if it was my cable. As we headed back toward the city, me a little disappointed that the landscape hadn’t been so easy to read, a building a mile or so from the beach caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. It sat on the edge of a suburban subdivision and looked basically like a house except for being too big, and it had telltale steel vents beneath its eaves. I swung around at the next light and pulled up in front. It had a sturdy gate, big surveillance cameras, and a few cars in a small parking lot—including a white pickup truck with a tool case in the back and an AT&T logo on the door. That’s when I noticed the mailbox: hardware store stickers spelled “TT,” with the faint outline of the ripped-off “A” still visible. This wasn’t my cable, but it was my kind of place—clear enough to particularize the single pathway, to layer the fluid geography of the Internet on the sandy ground of Long Island, and across the ocean in between.
In the interval, I had been holding out for word from Simon Cooper at Tata, about a new cable landing on a beach, somewhere. The email from the press person in Mumbai came on a Thursday morning and said that, depending on the weather, the landing was planned for that coming Monday. Somewhere near Lisbon. Where exactly she wasn’t sure. I didn’t reply right away. Instead, I started looking for a plane ticket.
That Sunday morning I arrived in Portugal, crossed the Tagus River from Lisbon and turned west, again toward the Atlantic. I followed the sandy Costa da Caparica south for a few miles before heading back inland, into a neighborhood of modest weekend villas. Tata’s cable landing station sat slightly back from the road behind a high security fence. Unmarked and slightly sinister looking, it had thick concrete walls and windows with heavy steel frames. It could be mistaken for the home of an arms dealer, or perhaps the listening post of a top-secret intelligence service. It was far bigger than Paling’s station in Cornwall—a textbook example of Tyco’s excess. I pressed the intercom button and waited as the gate swept open, then mustered the extent of my jet-lagged concentration to ease the clutch on the manual transmission and slide into the small parking lot, crowded on a Sunday morning.
