Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

by Andrew Blum

  Rui Carrilho, the station manager, was a compact guy in his early forties. He wore a bright blue polo shirt, jeans, and leather oxfords, as if dressed for a Sunday stroll with his wife. He was not happy to see me. I was there on the invitation of his boss, Simon Cooper, but this was not a good week for visitors. Despite the calm winds and clear sky, he was in the middle of a shit storm. There was the reason I had come: the arrival on the beach of the West Africa Cable System, or WACS, which would soon reach from this hillside down the coast of Africa. But the station was also hosting a pair of technicians from Tyco headquarters in the United States, who had been working around the clock on the final commissioning of WACS’s direct competitor, the Main One cable, which followed nearly the identical route. They had been on call around the clock, waiting for direction from Tyco’s cable-laying ship, the Resolute, bobbing somewhere off the coast of Nigeria, the cable hauled up into its workshop, as its own technicians struggled to get out the kinks. And on top of all that, Tata brass had been pushing Carrilho to complete upgrades on the station’s third cable, which ran beneath the Bay of Biscay to England, crossed AC-1 somewhere in the deep, and landed at another large former Tyco station near Bristol. The cable station staff had been sleeping on the office floor all week and eating their evening meals at a restaurant nearby—sometimes joined by the exhausted Tyco engineers from New Jersey. Carrilho sat at the head, leading his men like the air force officer he once was. But the bags under Carrilho’s eyes—and the nervous intensity with which he gripped his BlackBerry and his Camels—made it clear: there was a lot going on. And I, a tourist, had walked into the middle of it.

  I’d hardly stepped into the place when he turned me back out the door and into the station minivan. “I am going to show you where the beach landing is, so you can get there on your own,” he said, eager to get rid of me as soon as possible. We headed toward the ocean, following a leafy boulevard, beneath which ran the cable from the beach (and far beyond). At the bottom of a steep hill was a tiny beach hamlet, a dusty turnaround where mangy dogs slept in the sun. Carrilho put on a hard hat and orange safety vest and mounted an orange flashing light to the top of the van. A pair of old men in plaid shirts shifted their gaze from the sea to us. A square of sand the size of a beach blanket had been scraped away to reveal a manhole, opening into a concrete vault. The manhole cover was stamped “Tyco Communications.” The vault had been dug a decade earlier in preparation for a cable that never arrived and had sat empty since. A red tent had been erected beside it, to house a temporary workshop.

  The next day, the cable-laying ship Peter Faber—specially designed for “near-shore operations”—would steam over from Lisbon with two miles of cable in its hold. It would be dragged up on the beach by a diver and affixed to a heavy steel plate inside the manhole. The Peter Faber would then head out to sea a couple of miles, turn slightly to the south, and drop the loose end over the side. A couple months later a much larger ship would come back to pick it up with a grappling hook, fuse it to the end of the remaining nine thousand miles of cable it carried in its hull tanks, and turn southward, following a precisely prescribed route above underwater canyons and along the edges of invisible cliffs. For the people of South Africa, Namibia, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Cape Verde, and the Canary Islands—the cable’s successive landing points—this singular spot on the earth would soon affix this continent to the other. That, at least, was the plan for the next days and months. The plan for the next hour was lunch.

  Almost on top of the manhole was a beachside restaurant with Coca-Cola umbrellas on the patio. At a long table inside, the underwater construction team had assembled. With their red jumpsuits, sea-weathered faces, and windblown hair, they looked like a band of pirates. I helped myself to a seat beside one wearing a bandanna over his unruly black hair and a gold loop in his ear. Carrilho sat at the other end of the table, between the wizened construction manager, Luis, with a yellow mustache, and his foreman, Antonio, who looked a bit like Tom Cruise and had the determination and emotional intensity of a preschooler. They sketched the next day’s landing plans on the white paper tablecloth until an enormous pot of fish stew arrived, along with glasses of Super Bock, the Portuguese lager. The conversation had been a mix of Portuguese and Spanish and had stopped for the soccer game on the TV. But when it came time to toast the success of the operation, they used the English term: to the “beach landing!”

  Landing day dawned cold and bright, the blues of the ocean and sky in apparent competition to be the deepest. Carrilho had his hard hat and vest on, and he’d brought along one of the young guys from the station, who wore a big camera around his neck. He paced in and out of the café, ordering espressos and checking the horizon. The construction team arrived by boat from a port a few miles down the coast, bouncing in on their inflatable skiff like a platoon of marines. A group of Angolan day laborers had assembled, and Luis handed out red polo shirts from a big cardboard box. A pair of British engineers, in fleece and cargo pants, kept to themselves, perched on the edge of a small sand cliff. They worked for Alcatel-Lucent, the telecommunications conglomerate that manufactured the cable and owned the ships that would lay it on the ocean floor.

  A large Hyundai excavator was parked down by the water, its articulated arm raised in a curled salute, a sign reading CARLOS propped against its windshield. Carlos himself sat inside the cab, leaning forward against the dashboard. Normally he demolished historic buildings in Lisbon—delicate work. Luis had worked with him before. “He can scratch your nose with his bucket, and you wouldn’t mind,” Luis said, wiggling a finger at me. The previous day, Carlos had dug a deep trench in the beach, leaving a sandcastle as big as his machine. In its depths was the mouth of a steel conduit that ran back up to the manhole; the fiber-optic cable would be pulled through it like a string through a straw.

  Just before nine one of the divers hopped out of the skiff and into the surf. Under his arm, he carried a length of lightweight green nylon line. He high-stepped through the waves up onto the beach and handed the line to one of the laborers. There was no handshake or ceremony to mark this first moment of physical connection, the initial link between land and sea that would be leveraged into a nine-thousand-mile path of light—and, its backers hoped, a stream of information that would transform a continent. Carrilho stopped his pacing on the café patio to watch. Soon after, the blue hull of the cable ship Peter Faber steamed into view from the north, its large white antennae dome perched like a Ping-Pong ball at the peak of its superstructure. Longer than a tugboat and sleeker than a trawler, its GPS-controlled propulsion system allowed it to hover in place, even in rough conditions. It parked almost a kilometer offshore, precisely lined up with the beach manhole, and wouldn’t move from that spot for a day and a half.

  The skiff headed out to meet it, paying out the lightweight green messenger line as it went. Two dogs frisked on the beach, jumping back and forth across the thick rope. A bulldozer chugged down to the water, and the rope was knotted to its hitch. It began a series of slow processions down the beach, parallel to the water, dragging the line around a pulley, a hundred meters at a time in from the ship. The dozer would chug out at a walking pace, drop the knot, and then reverse along the same tracks, to pick up the next length. The fiber-optic cable itself soon began coming off the ship, suspended just below the surface of the water by a necklace of orange buoys—the modern-day version of the “casks” used in Porthcurno, in 1919. As each buoy reached the shore, a laborer skipped into the surf and untied it from the cable.

  Carrilho and I watched the action from the restaurant patio, sitting at separate tables. He had a tab open, and I joined him in a steady alternating rhythm of espresso and beer. A soft onshore breeze brought the pleasantly nautical smell of the skiff’s two-stroke engines. It had been working hard keeping fishing boats from crossing the cable, patrolling back and forth like a border collie. By lunchtime, the bulldozer
had completed its slow laps, and the cable arced in from the ship beneath its necklace of orange buoys. Wearing thick gloves, the laborers manhandled it into the mouth of the conduit, straining under its weight. They laid it out in an S-pattern down to the surf, in case the ocean wanted a little more for itself. I emailed Simon Cooper a picture of the action and captioned it “taken forty-five seconds ago.” I got a message back a few minutes later: “And viewed on my BlackBerry whilst roaming in Tokyo.”

  With the cable in position, the diver walked back into the surf holding a knife. Bobbing his head under the waves, he began to cut the orange buoys free, so that the cable could drop to the seafloor. With each slice, a buoy popped a few feet into the air, and then shot south with the breeze. By the time he was a hundred or so meters out, I could no longer see him, only his handiwork: orange buoys popping up out of the surf like beach balls, the skiff chasing each one down. When he arrived at the cable ship, the Dutch crew gave him a few cookies and a glass of juice, and then he jumped back into the ocean and swam the kilometer back to shore. Back on the beach, chest heaving and eyes wide, he lit a cigarette.

  I walked around to the side door of the restaurant, where the two English engineers were hard at work on the cable. They’d driven from Alcatel-Lucent’s offices in London, in a station wagon full of tools. Matt was tall, with a square head, a big potbelly, and a jolly voice. He lived in Greenwich—“home of time,” he sang—and was eager to get back there for his son’s birthday that weekend. Mark was rougher, with a gold tooth and a big tattoo on an arm Popeye would envy. He’d spent his working life all over the world on Alcatel’s behalf, in places like Bermuda (“perfect”), California (“lovely”), Singapore (“a great city, if you like sitting down in the evening with a beer”). In blue Alcatel polo shirts and cargo work pants, the two of them went at the cable with hacksaws. It was armored with two layers of woven steel mesh that had to be stripped off before they made the “joint” in the manhole. They put their full weight into peeling back the casing, as if butchering a shark. While they worked, a fisherman in a flannel shirt and rubber boots knocked on the kitchen door. He had a stiff tote bag filled with two glistening dourada, or sea bream, the same as in yesterday’s fish stew. The chef took them. Matt yelled into his telephone: “We’ve got twenty-five in the manhole and another twenty on the beach,” meaning meters of cable—enough slack underground to finish the joint, and enough on the beach to allow the cable some give in a storm.

  Once the cable was stripped back to its pinkish intestines, Matt and Mark fed it into the red tent to begin the work of fusing the fibers together. Matt set a cup of tea beside him on the workbench and began using a tool that looked like a corkscrew to shear off the cable’s plastic inner core, which surrounded a perfect tube of shiny copper. Inside of that was another layer of black threads; inside of each, colored rubber; inside of the rubber, the fiber itself. With the removal of each successive layer, the work became increasingly delicate: he worked first like a butcher, then a fisherman, then a sous-chef, now finally a jeweler, as he held each fiber between his pursed lips. When the fiber itself was finally visible, the eight strands glinted in the sunlight, each a hundred and twenty-five microns wide. He put baby powder in his palm and ran the end of each fiber through it, like a violin’s bow, to clean off any residue.

  Then he began to fuse each to its shoreside mate. There were eight strands, each a different color, looped around the worktable. One at a time, Matt placed a strand inside a machine that looked like a hole puncher. A small screen magnified the fibers’ alignment, and he adjusted it so the two ends lined up, like the hand of God in Michelangelo’s fresco. Then he pressed a button that baked the two ends together, sipping tea with his pinky up while the machine did its work. Then he slid a little protective plastic sheath over the now-continuous strand and mounted it in a dainty rack, like a fishing tackle. With today’s technology, each fiber could transmit more than a terabit of data per second, on an undersea journey of two-tenths of a second.

  I had been watching from just outside the red tent that sheltered the makeshift workshop, and Carrilho came up beside me, intently watching Matt’s delicate work. “That’s the fiber,” Carrilho said. “That’s what makes the money.”

  With all eight strands finally spliced together, Matt mounted them inside a finely machined black steel case, with two large red laser warning stickers, and an elegant Alcatel-Lucent plaque, with Origin France written in energetic italic script—the hood ornament of Tata’s $600 million wire. Mark had been working in the manhole, doing the heavy labor of tightening the steel mesh cable around a heavy steel plate built into its wall. Matt passed the case down to him, to be mounted inside.

  A car pulled up behind me and Carrilho, and a man in a pressed white shirt and tie, on his way home from work, stepped out. He looked into the manhole, at the equipment arrayed inside the tent, and the ship steady offshore.

  “A cable? To Brazil?” he asked.

  “Africa,” Carrilho replied.

  The commuter raised his eyebrows, shook his head, and went home to dinner. For the people of this seaside village, this was a temporary disruption, a few days of bulldozers on the beach and some extra trucks in the municipal lot. By the end of the week, the manhole would be covered, and the cable to Africa would be forgotten under the sand.

  7

  * * *

  Where Data Sleeps

  The Dalles, Oregon, has always been a special kind of crossroads, a place where geography has repeatedly forced the hand of infrastructure. Its odd name—it rhymes with neither “balls” nor “bells”—comes from the French word for “flagstone” and refers to the rocks in the mighty Columbia River, which narrows here before plunging through the great gap in the Cascade Range known as the Columbia River Gorge. Everything here has followed from that.

  When Lewis and Clark arrived in 1805 on their exploration of the west, they found the largest Native American gathering place in the region. During the annual salmon runs, the population swelled to nearly ten thousand, about the same size as the town today. For a while the Oregon Trail ended in The Dalles, where western settlers faced the uncomfortable choice of mule-packing around 11,249-foot-tall Mt. Hood, or braving the Columbia’s rapids. The Dalles was the choke point in the path of western migration. It still is.

  From my motel room the landscape looked like a battlefield between geology and industry. In the backdrop were the lumpy tan foothills of the Cascades, covered in wisps of fog on a rainy late-winter day. In the near distance was the Union Pacific rail yard, where freight trains stopped and stuttered before descending through the modern alignment that hugs the basalt cliffs of the gorge. Parallel to the tracks is Interstate 84, the first major east/west route across the mountains until Interstate 80 in California, nearly six hundred miles to the south. Truck traffic rushed by all night, heading west to Portland, or east toward Spokane, Boise, and Salt Lake. The river itself was wide and gurgly. I watched cars streaming antlike across the Dalles Bridge, just downstream from the Dalles Dam, a small piece of the vast hydroelectric system built by the Army Corps of Engineers and marketed by the Bonneville Power Administration, whose high-tension lines lace the hills. The Dalles is a key node in the power grid of the entire western United States. Most notably, it is the starting point for a 3,100-megawatt transmission path, known as the Pacific DC Intertie, which transfers hydroelectric power from the Columbia River basin to Southern California, like a massive extension cord dragged up from Los Angeles. Its plug is the Celilo Converter Station, just over the hill from my motel room. The Dalles might be a small place but you wouldn’t say it’s off the beaten path. It is the beaten path: an infrastructural confluence, where the inescapable topography of the Cascades and the Columbia River have forced together salmon, settlers, railroads, highways, power lines, and, as it turns out, the Internet.

  I had come to The Dalles because it is home to one of the Internet’s most important repositories of data, as well as being the de facto capi
tal of a whole region devoted to storing our online selves. The place struck me as a sort of Kathmandu for data centers, a foggy town at the base of a mountain that happened to be the perfect jumping-off point for an exploration of the massive buildings where our data is stored. Even better, The Dalles was mysterious and evocative enough—a natural nexus—to highlight these buildings’ strange powers. A data center doesn’t merely contain the hard drives that contain our data. Our data has become the mirror of our identities, the physical embodiment of our most personal facts and feelings. A data center is the storehouse of the digital soul. I liked the idea of data centers tucked away up in the mountains like wizards—or perhaps warheads. And Kathmandu felt right in another way: I was looking for enlightenment, for a new sense of my digital self.

  Up until now I’d focused mainly on exchange points: the Internet’s central hubs, the places where networks meet to become an Internetwork. My mind had filled with accumulated images of corrugated steel buildings, yellow fiber-optic cables, and basement vaults. But data centers presented a different challenge on this journey. They seemed to be everywhere. As I considered this, a more schematic image of the Internet came to mind, of two funnels fused at their narrow ends, like a siamese vuvuzela. The exchanges sit at the narrow spot in the middle. There aren’t very many of them, but they are the choke points for the vast majority of traffic. One funnel pulls in all of us: the billions of “eyeballs” scattered around the world. The other funnel catches the buildings where our data is stored, processed, and served. Data centers are what’s on the other end of the tubes. They’re only able to exist in faraway places thanks to the thicket of networks everywhere else.