4122 lines
237 KiB
Markdown
4122 lines
237 KiB
Markdown
---
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created_at: '2017-11-06T12:41:50.000Z'
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title: Mother Earth Mother Board (1996)
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url: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
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author: wallflower
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points: 79
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story_text:
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 20
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1509972110
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_wallflower
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- story_15635028
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objectID: '15635028'
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year: 1996
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---
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**The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous
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meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest
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wire on Earth.**
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**In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and
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wondrous meatspace of three continents, acquainting himself with the
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customs and dialects of the exotic Manhole Villagers of Thailand, the
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U-Turn Tunnelers of the Nile Delta, the Cable Nomads of Lan tao Island,
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the Slack Control Wizards of Chelmsford, the Subterranean
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||
Ex-Telegraphers of Cornwall, and other previously unknown and
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unchronicled folk; also, biographical sketches of the two long-dead
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Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lords of global telecommunications, and other
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||
material pertaining to the business and technology of Undersea
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Fiber-Optic Cables, as well as an account of the laying of the longest
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wire on Earth, which should not be without interest to the readers of
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Wired.**
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Information moves, or we move to it. Moving to it has rarely been
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popular and is growing unfashionable; nowadays we demand that the
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information come to us. This can be accomplished in three basic ways:
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moving physical media around, broadcasting radiation through space, and
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sending signals through wires. This article is about what will, for a
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short time anyway, be the biggest and best wire ever made.
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Wires warp cyberspace in the same way wormholes warp physical space: the
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two points at opposite ends of a wire are, for informational purposes,
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the same point, even if they are on opposite sides of the planet. The
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cyberspace-warping power of wires, therefore, changes the geometry of
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the world of commerce and politics and ideas that we live in. The
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financial districts of New York, London, and Tokyo, linked by thousands
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of wires, are much closer to each other than, say, the Bronx is to
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Manhattan.
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Today this is all quite familiar, but in the 19th century, when the
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first feeble bits struggled down the first undersea cable joining the
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Old World to the New, it must have made people's hair stand up on end in
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more than just the purely electrical sense - it must have seemed
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supernatural. Perhaps this sort of feeling explains why when Samuel
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Morse stretched a wire between Washington and Baltimore in 1844, the
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first message he sent with his code was "What hath God wrought\!" -
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almost as if he needed to reassure himself and others that God, and not
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the Devil, was behind it.
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During the decades after Morse's "What hath God wrought\!" a plethora of
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different codes, signalling techniques, and sending and receiving
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machines were patented. A web of wires was spun across every modern city
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on the globe, and longer wires were strung between cities. Some of the
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early technologies were, in retrospect, flaky: one early inventor wanted
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to use 26-wire cables, one wire for each letter of the alphabet. But it
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quickly became evident that it was best to keep the number of individual
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wires as low as possible and find clever ways to fit more information
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onto them.
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This requires more ingenuity than you might think - wires have never
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been perfectly transparent carriers of data; they have always degraded
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the information put into them. In general, this gets worse as the wire
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gets longer, and so as the early telegraph networks spanned greater
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distances, the people building them had to edge away from the
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seat-of-the-pants engineering practices that, applied in another field,
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gave us so many boiler explosions, and toward the more scientific
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approach that is the standard of practice today.
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Still, telegraphy, like many other forms of engineering, retained a
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certain barnyard, improvised quality until the Year of Our Lord 1858,
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when the terrifyingly high financial stakes and shockingly formidable
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technical challenges of the first transatlantic submarine cable brought
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certain long-simmering conflicts to a rolling boil, incarnated the old
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and new approaches in the persons of Dr. Wildman Whitehouse and
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Professor William Thomson, respectively, and brought the conflict
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between them into the highest possible relief in the form of an inquiry
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and a scandal that rocked the Victorian world. Thomson came out on top,
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with a new title and name - Lord Kelvin.
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Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of
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decades also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high
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tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon
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needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable
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projects (I recommend Arthur C. Clarke's book How the World Was One).
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The only things that have changed since then are that the stakes have
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gotten smaller, the process more bureaucratized, and the personalities
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less interesting.
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Those early cables were eventually made to work, albeit not without
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founding whole new fields of scientific inquiry and generating many
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lucrative patents. Undersea cables, and long-distance communications in
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general, became the highest of high tech, with many of the same
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connotations as rocket science or nuclear physics or brain surgery would
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acquire in later decades. Some countries and companies (the distinction
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between countries and companies is hazy in the telco world) became very
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good at it, and some didn't. AT\&T acquired a dominance of the field
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that largely continues to this day and is only now being seriously
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challenged by a project called FLAG: the Fiberoptic Link Around the
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Globe.
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\_\_ In which the Hacker Tourist encounters: Penang, a microcosm of the
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Internet. Rubber, Penang's chief commodity, and its many uses:
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protecting wires from the elements and concupiscent wanderers from
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harmful DNA. Advantages of chastity, both for hacker tourists and for
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cable layers. Bizarre Spectaclesin the jungles of southern Thailand.
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FLAG, its origins and its enemies.\_\_
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5° 241 24.932' N, 100° 241 19.748' E City of George Town, Island of
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Penang, Malaysia
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FLAG, a fiber-optic cable now being built from England to Japan, is a
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skinny little cuss (about an inch in diameter), but it is 28,000
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kilometers long, which is long even compared to really big things like
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the planet Earth. When it is finished in September 1997, it arguably
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will be the longest engineering project in history. Writing about it
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necessitates a lot of banging around through meatspace. Over the course
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of two months, photographer Alex Tehrani and I hit six countries and
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four continents trying to get a grip on this longest, fastest, mother of
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all wires. I took a GPS receiver with me so that I could have at least a
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general idea of where the hell we were. It gave me the above reading in
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front of a Chinese temple around the corner from the Shangri-La Hotel in
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Penang, Malaysia, which was only one of 100 peculiar spots around the
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globe where I suddenly pulled up short and asked myself, "What the hell
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am I doing here?"
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You might well ask yourself the same question before diving into an
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article as long as this one. The answer is that we all depend heavily on
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wires, but we hardly ever think about them. Before learning about FLAG,
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I knew that data packets could get from America to Asia or the Middle
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East, but I had no idea how. I knew that it had something to do with
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wires across the bottom of the ocean, but I didn't know how many of
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those wires existed, how they got there, who controlled them, or how
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many bits they could carry.
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According to legend, in 1876 the first sounds transmitted down a wire
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were Alexander Graham Bell saying "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you."
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Compared with Morse's "What hath God wrought\!'' this is disappointingly
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banal - as if Neil Armstrong, setting foot on the moon, had uttered the
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words: "Buzz, could you toss me that rock hammer?'' It's as though
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during the 32 years following Morse's message, people had become inured
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to the amazing powers of wire.
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Today, another 120 years later, we take wires completely for granted.
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This is most unwise. People who use the Internet (or for that matter,
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who make long-distance phone calls) but who don't know about wires are
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just like the millions of complacent motorists who pump gasoline into
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their cars without ever considering where it came from or how it found
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its way to the corner gas station. That works only until the political
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situation in the Middle East gets all screwed up, or an oil tanker runs
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aground on a wildlife refuge. In the same way, it behooves wired people
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to know a few things about wires - how they work, where they lie, who
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owns them, and what sorts of business deals and political machinations
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bring them into being.
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In the hopes of learning more about the modern business of really,
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really long wires, we spent much of the summer of 1996 in pursuits such
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as: being arrested by toothless, shotgun-toting Egyptian cops; getting
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pushed around by a drunken smuggler queen on a Thai train; vaulting over
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rustic gates to take emergency shits in isolated fields; being kept
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awake by groovy Eurotrash backpackers singing songs; blowing Saharan
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dust out of cameras; scraping equatorial mold out of fountain pens;
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stuffing faded banknotes into the palms of Egyptian service-industry
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professionals; trying to persuade non-English-speaking taxi drivers that
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we really did want to visit the beach even though it was pouring rain;
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and laundering clothes by showering in them. We still missed more than
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half the countries FLAG touches.
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Our method was not exactly journalism nor tourism in the normal sense
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but what might be thought of as a new field of human endeavor called
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hacker tourism: travel to exotic locations in search of sights and
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sensations that only would be of interest to a geek.
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I will introduce sections with readings from my trusty GPS in case other
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hacker tourists would like to leap over the same rustic gates or get
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rained on at the same beaches
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\_\_ 5° 26.325' N, 100° 17.417' E Penang Botanical Gardens\_\_
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Penang, one of the first sites visited by this hacker tourist partly
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because of its little-known historical importance to wires, lies just
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off the west coast of the Malay Peninsula. The British acquired it from
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the local sultan in the late 1700s, built a pathetic fort above the
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harbor, and named it, appropriately, after the hapless General
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Cornwallis. They set up a couple of churches and established the kernel
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of a judicial system. A vigorous market grew up around them. A few
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kilometers away, they built a botanical garden.
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This seems like an odd set of priorities to us today. But gardens were
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not mere decorations to the British - they were strategic installations.
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The headquarters was Kew Gardens outside of London. Penang was one of
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the forward outposts, and it became incomparably more important than the
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nearby fort. In 1876, 70,000 seeds of the rubber tree, painstakingly
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collected by botanists in the Amazon rain forest, were brought to Kew
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Gardens and planted in a greenhouse. About 2,800 of them germinated and
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were shipped to the botanical gardens in Sri Lanka and Penang, where
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they propagated explosively and were used to establish rubber
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plantations.
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Most of these plantations were on the neighboring Malay Peninsula, a
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lumpy, bony tentacle of land that stretches for 1,000 miles from Bangkok
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in the north to Singapore in the south, where it grazes the equator. The
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landscape is a stalemate between, on one hand, the devastatingly
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powerful erosive forces of continual tropical rainstorms and dense plant
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life, and, on the other hand, some really, really hard rocks. Anything
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with the least propensity to be eroded did so a long time ago and turned
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into a paddy. What's left are ridges of stone that rise almost
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vertically from the landscape and are still mostly covered with rain
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forest, notwithstanding efforts by the locals to cut it all down. The
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flat stuff is all used for something - coconuts, date palms, banana
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trees, and above all, rubber.
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Until artificial rubber was invented by the colony-impaired Germans, no
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modern economy could exist without the natural stuff. All of the
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important powers had tropical colonies where rubber was produced. For
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the Netherlands, it was Indonesia; for France, it was Indochina; for the
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British, it was what they then called Malaya, as well as many other
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places.
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Without rubber and another kind of tree resin called gutta-percha, it
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would not have been possible to wire the world. Early telegraph lines
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were just naked conductors strung from pole to pole, but this worked
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poorly, especially in wet conditions, so some kind of flexible but
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durable insulation was needed. After much trial and error, rubber became
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the standard for terrestrial and aerial wires while gutta-percha (a
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natural gum also derived from a tree grown in Malaya) was used for
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submarine cables. Gutta-percha is humble-looking stuff, a nondescript
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brown crud that surrounds the inner core of old submarine cables to a
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thickness of perhaps 1 centimeter, but it was a wonder material back in
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those days, and the longer it remained immersed in salt water, the
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better it got.
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So far, it was all according to the general plan that the British had in
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mind: find some useful DNA in the Americas, stockpile it at Kew Gardens,
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propagate it to other botanical gardens around the world, make money off
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the proceeds, and grow the economy. Modern-day Penang, however, is a
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good example of the notion of unintended consequences.
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As soon as the British had established the rule of law in Penang,
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various kinds of Chinese people began to move in and establish
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businesses. Most of them were Hokkien Chinese from north of Hong Kong,
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though Cantonese, Hakka, and other groups also settled there. Likewise,
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Tamils and Sikhs came from across the Bay of Bengal. As rubber trees
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began to take over the countryside, a common arrangement was for Chinese
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immigrants to establish rubber plantations and hire Indian immigrants
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(as well as Malays) as laborers.
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The British involvement, then, was more catalytic than anything else.
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They didn't own the rubber plantations. They merely bought the rubber on
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an open market from Chinese brokers who in turn bought it from producers
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of various ethnicities. The market was just a few square blocks of
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George Town where British law was enforced, i.e. where businessmen could
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rely on a few basics like property rights, contracts, and a currency.
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During and after World War II, the British lost what presence they had
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here. Penang fell to the Japanese and became a base for German U-Boats
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patrolling the Indian Ocean. Later, there was a somewhat messy
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transition to independence involving a communist insurrection and a war
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with Indonesia. Today, Malaysia is one of Asia's economic supernovas and
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evidently has decided that it will be second to none when it comes to
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the Internet. They are furiously wiring up the place and have
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established JARING, which is the Malaysian Internet (this word is a
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somewhat tortured English acronym that happens to spell out the Malay
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word for the Net).
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If you have a look at JARING's homepage (www.jaring.my/jaring), you will
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be confronted by a link that will take you to a page reciting Malaysia's
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censorship laws, which, like most censorship laws, are ridiculously
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vague and hence sort of creepy and yet, in the context of the Internet,
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totally unworkable.
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In a way, the architects of JARING are trying to run the Kew Gardens
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experiment all over again. By adopting the Internet protocol for their
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national information infrastructure, they have copied the same DNA that,
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planted in the deregulated telecom environment of the United States, has
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grown like some unstoppable exotic weed. Now they are trying to raise
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the same plant inside a hothouse (because they want it to flourish) but
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in a pot (because they don't want it to escape into the wild).
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They seem to have misunderstood both their own history and that of the
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Internet, which run strangely parallel. Today the streets of George
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Town, Penang's main city, are so vivid, crowded, and intensely
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multicultural that by comparison they make New York City look like
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Colonial Williamsburg. Every block has a mosque or Hindu temple or
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Buddhist shrine or Christian church. You can get any kind of food, hear
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any language. The place is thronged, but it's affluent, and it works.
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It's a lot like the Internet.
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Both Penang and the Internet were established basically for strategic
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military reasons. In both cases, what was built by the military was
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merely a kernel for a much vaster phenomenon that came along later. This
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kernel was really nothing more than a protocol, a set of rules. If you
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wanted to follow those rules, you could participate, otherwise you were
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free to go elsewhere. Because the protocol laid down a standard way for
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people to interact, which was clearly set out and could be understood by
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anyone, it attracted smart, adaptable, ambitious people from all over
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the place, and at a certain point it flew completely out of control and
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turned into something that no one had ever envisioned: something
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thriving, colorful, wildly diverse, essentially peaceful, and plagued
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only by the congestion of its own success.
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JARING's link to the global Internet is over an undersea cable that
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connects it to the United States. This is typical of many Southeast
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Asian countries, which are far better connected to the US than they are
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to one another. But in late June of 1996, a barge called the Elbe
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appeared off the coast of Penang. Divers and boats came ashore, braving
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an infestation of sea snakes, and floated in a segment of armored cable
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that will become Malaysia's link to FLAG. The capacity of that cable is
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theoretically some 5.3 Gbps. Much of this will be used for telephone and
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other non-Internet purposes, but it can't help but serve as a major
|
||
floodgate between JARING, the censored pseudo-Internet of Malaysia, and
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the rest of the Net. After that, it will be interesting to see how long
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JARING remains confined to its pot.
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\_\_ FLAG facts\_\_
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The FLAG system, that mother of all wires, starts at Porthcurno,
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England, and proceeds to Estepona, Spain; through the Strait of
|
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Gibraltar to Palermo, Sicily; across the Mediterranean to Alexandria and
|
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Port Said, Egypt; overland from those two cities to Suez, Egypt; down
|
||
the Gulf of Suez and the Red Sea, with a potential branching unit to
|
||
Jedda, Saudia Arabia; around the Arabian Peninsula to Dubai, site of the
|
||
FLAG Network Operations Center; across the Indian Ocean to Bombay;
|
||
around the tip of India and across the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea
|
||
to Ban Pak Bara, Thailand, with a branch down to Penang, Malaysia;
|
||
overland across Thailand to Songkhla; up through the South China Sea to
|
||
Lan Tao Island in Hong Kong; up the coast of China to a branch in the
|
||
East China Sea where one fork goes to Shanghai and the other to Koje-do
|
||
Island in Korea, and finally to two separate landings in Japan -
|
||
Ninomiya and Miura, which are owned by rival carriers.
|
||
|
||
Phone company people tend to think (and do business) in terms of
|
||
circuits. Hacker tourists, by contrast, tend to think in terms of bits
|
||
per second. Converting between these two units of measurements is
|
||
simple: on any modern phone system, the conversations are transmitted
|
||
digitally, and the standard bit rate that is used for this purpose is 64
|
||
kbps. A circuit, then, in telephony jargon, amounts to a datastream of
|
||
64 kbps.
|
||
|
||
Copper submarine cables of only a few decades ago could carry only a few
|
||
dozen circuits - say, about 2,500 kbps total. The first generation of
|
||
optical-fiber cables, by contrast, carries more than 1,000 times as much
|
||
data - 280 Mbps of data per fiber pair. (Fibers always come in pairs.
|
||
This practice seems obvious to a telephony person, who is in the
|
||
business of setting up symmetrical two-way circuits, but makes no
|
||
particular sense to a hacker tourist who tends to think in terms of
|
||
one-way packet transmission. The split between these two ways of
|
||
thinking runs very deep and accounts for much tumult in the telecom
|
||
world, as will be explained later.) The second generation of
|
||
optical-fiber cables carries 560 Mbps per fiber pair. FLAG and other
|
||
third-generation systems will carry 5.3 Gbps per pair. Or, in the system
|
||
of units typically used by phone company people, they will carry 60,000
|
||
circuits on each fiber pair.
|
||
|
||
If you multiply 60,000 circuits times 64 kbps per circuit, you get a bit
|
||
rate of only 3.84 Gbps, which leaves 1.46 Gbps unaccounted for. This
|
||
bandwidth is devoted to various kinds of overhead, such as frame headers
|
||
and error correction. The FLAG cable contains two sets of fiber pairs,
|
||
and so its theoretical maximum capacity is 120,000 circuits, or (not
|
||
counting the overhead) just under 8 Gbps of actual throughput.
|
||
|
||
These numbers really knock 'em dead in the phone industry. To the hacker
|
||
tourist, or anyone who spends much time messing around with computer
|
||
networks, they seem distinctly underwhelming. All this trouble and
|
||
expense for a measly 8 Gbps? You've got to be kidding\! Again, it comes
|
||
down to a radical difference in perspective between telephony people and
|
||
internet people.
|
||
|
||
In defense of telephony people, it must be pointed out that they are the
|
||
ones who really know the score when it comes to sending bits across
|
||
oceans. Netheads have heard so much puffery about the robust nature of
|
||
the Internet and its amazing ability to route around obstacles that they
|
||
frequently have a grossly inflated conception of how many routes packets
|
||
can take between continents and how much bandwidth those routes can
|
||
carry. As of this writing, I have learned that nearly the entire state
|
||
of Minnesota was recently cut off from the Internet for 13 hours because
|
||
it had only one primary connection to the global Net, and that link went
|
||
down. If Minnesota, of all places, is so vulnerable, one can imagine how
|
||
tenuous many international links must be.
|
||
|
||
Douglas Barnes, an Oakland-based hacker and cypherpunk, looked into this
|
||
issue a couple of years ago when, inspired by Bruce Sterling's Islands
|
||
in the Net, he was doing background research on a project to set up a
|
||
data haven in the Caribbean. "I found out that the idea of the Internet
|
||
as a highly distributed, redundant global communications system is a
|
||
myth,'' he discovered. "Virtually all communications between countries
|
||
take place through a very small number of bottlenecks, and the available
|
||
bandwidth simply isn't that great.'' And he cautions: "Even outfits like
|
||
FLAG don't really grok the Internet. The undersized cables they are
|
||
running reflect their myopic outlook.''
|
||
|
||
So the bad news is that the capacity of modern undersea cables like FLAG
|
||
isn't very impressive by Internet standards, but the slightly better
|
||
news is that such cables are much better than what we have now.Here's
|
||
how they work: Signals are transmitted down the fiber as modulated laser
|
||
light with a wavelength of 1,558 nanometers (nm), which is in the
|
||
infrared range. These signals begin to fade after they have traveled a
|
||
certain distance, so it's necessary to build amplifiers into the cable
|
||
every so often. In the case of FLAG, the spacing of these amplifiers
|
||
ranges from 45 to 85 kilometers. They work on a strikingly simple and
|
||
elegant principle. Each amplifier contains an approximately
|
||
10-meter-long piece of special fiber that has been doped with erbium
|
||
ions, making it capable of functioning as a laser medium. A separate
|
||
semiconductor laser built into the amplifier generates powerful light at
|
||
1,480 nm - close to the same frequency as the signal beam, but not close
|
||
enough to interfere with it. This light, directed into the doped fiber,
|
||
pumps the electrons orbiting around those erbium ions up to a higher
|
||
energy level.
|
||
|
||
The signal coming down the FLAG cable passes through the doped fiber and
|
||
causes it to lase, i.e., the excited electrons drop back down to a lower
|
||
energy level, emitting light that is coherent with the incoming signal -
|
||
which is to say that it is an exact copy of the incoming signal, except
|
||
more powerful.
|
||
|
||
The amplifiers need power - up to 10,000 volts DC, at 0.9 amperes. Since
|
||
public 10,000-volt outlets are few and far between on the bottom of the
|
||
ocean, this power must be delivered down the same cable that carries the
|
||
fibers. The cable, therefore, consists of an inner core of four optical
|
||
fibers, coated with plastic jackets of different colors so that the
|
||
people at opposite ends can tell which is which, plus a thin copper wire
|
||
that is used for test purposes. The total thickness of these elements
|
||
taken together is comparable to a pencil lead; they are contained within
|
||
a transparent plastic tube. Surrounding this tube is a sheath consisting
|
||
of three steel segments designed so that they interlock and form a
|
||
circular jacket. Around that is a layer of about 20 steel "strength
|
||
wires" - each perhaps 2 mm in diameter - that wrap around the core in a
|
||
steep helix. Around the strength wires goes a copper tube that serves as
|
||
the conductor for the 10,000-volt power feed. Only one conductor is
|
||
needed because the ocean serves as the ground wire. This tube also is
|
||
watertight and so performs the additional function of protecting the
|
||
cable's innards. It then is surrounded by polyethylene insulation to a
|
||
total thickness of about an inch. To protect it from the rigors of
|
||
shipment and laying, the entire cable is clothed in good old-fashioned
|
||
tarred jute, although jute nowadays is made from plastic, not hemp.
|
||
|
||
This suffices for the deep-sea portions of the cable. In shallower
|
||
waters, additional layers of protection are laid on, beginning with a
|
||
steel antishark jacket. As the shore is approached, various other layers
|
||
of steel armoring wires are added.
|
||
|
||
This more or less describes how all submarine cables are being made as
|
||
of 1996. Only a few companies in the world know how to make cables like
|
||
this: AT\&T Submarine Systems International (AT\&T-SSI) in the US,
|
||
Alcatel in France, and KDD Submarine Cable Systems (KDD-SCS) in Japan,
|
||
among others. AT\&T-SSI and KDD-SCS frequently work together on large
|
||
projects and are responsible for FLAG. Alcatel, in classic French
|
||
fasion, likes to go it alone.
|
||
|
||
This basic technology will, by the end of the century, be carrying most
|
||
of the information between continents. Copper-based coaxial cable
|
||
systems are still in operation in many places around the world, but all
|
||
of them will have reached the end of their practical lifetimes within a
|
||
few years. Even if they still function, they are not worth the trouble
|
||
it takes to operate them. TPC-1 (Trans Pacific Cable \#1), which
|
||
connected Japan to Guam and hence to the United States in 1964, is still
|
||
in perfect working order, but so commercially worthless that it has been
|
||
turned over to a team at Tokyo University, which is using it to carry
|
||
out seismic research. The capacity of such cables is so tiny that modern
|
||
fiber cables could absorb all of their traffic with barely a hiccup if
|
||
the right switches and routers were in place. Likewise, satellites have
|
||
failed to match some of the latest leaps in fiber capacity and can no
|
||
longer compete with submarine cables, at least until such time as
|
||
low-flying constellations such as Iridium and Teledesic begin operating.
|
||
|
||
Within the next few years, several huge third-generational optical fiber
|
||
systems will be coming online: not only FLAG but a FLAG competitor
|
||
called SEA-ME-WE 3 (Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe \#3);
|
||
TPC-5 (Trans-Pacific Cable \#5); APCN (Asia-Pacific Cable Network),
|
||
which is a web of cables interconnecting Japan, Korea, Hong Kong,
|
||
Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, and the
|
||
Philippines; and the latest TAT (Transatlantic) cable. So FLAG is part
|
||
of a trend that will soon bring about a vast increase in
|
||
intercontinental bandwidth.
|
||
|
||
What is unusual about FLAG is not its length (although it will be the
|
||
longest cable ever constructed) or its technology (which is shared by
|
||
other cables) but how it came into existence. But that's a business
|
||
question which will be dealt with later. First, the hacker tourist is
|
||
going to travel a short distance up the Malay Peninsula to southern
|
||
Thailand, one of the two places where FLAG passes overland. On a world
|
||
map this looks about as difficult as throwing an extension cord over a
|
||
sandbar, but when you actually get there, it turns out to be a colossal
|
||
project
|
||
|
||
\_\_ 7° 3.467' N,100° 22.489' EFLAG manhole production site, southern
|
||
Thailand\_\_
|
||
|
||
Large portions of this section were written in a hotel in Ban Hat Yai,
|
||
Thailand, which is one of the information-transfer capitals of the
|
||
planet regardless of whether you think of information transfer as bits
|
||
propagating down an optical fiber, profound and complex religious faiths
|
||
being transmitted down through countless generations, or genetic
|
||
material being interchanged between consenting adults. Male travelers
|
||
approaching Ban Hat Yai will have a difficult time convincing travel
|
||
agents, railway conductors, and taxi drivers that they are coming only
|
||
to look at a big fat wire, but the hacker tourist must get used to being
|
||
misunderstood.
|
||
|
||
We stayed in a hotel with all the glossy accoutrements of an Asian
|
||
business center plus a few perks such as partially used jumbo condom
|
||
packages squirreled away on closet shelves, disconcertingly huge love
|
||
marks on the sofas, and extraordinarily long, fine, black hairs all over
|
||
the bathroom. While writing, I sat before a picture window looking out
|
||
over a fine view of: a well-maintained but completely empty swimming
|
||
pool, a green Carlsberg Beer billboard written in Thai script, an
|
||
industrial-scale whorehouse catering to Japanese "businessmen," a rather
|
||
fine Buddhist temple complex, and, behind that, a district of brand-new
|
||
high-rise hotels built to cater to the burgeoning information-transfer
|
||
industry, almost none of which has anything to do with bits and bytes.
|
||
Tropical storms rolled through, lightning flashed, I sucked down
|
||
European beers from the minibar and tried to cope with a bad case of
|
||
information overload. FLAG is a huge project, bigger and more
|
||
complicated than many wars, and to visit even chunks of this cable
|
||
operation is to be floored by it.
|
||
|
||
We first met Jim Daily and Alan Wall underneath that big Carlsberg sign,
|
||
sitting out in a late-afternoon rainstorm under an umbrella, having a
|
||
couple of beers - "the only \*ferangs \*here," as Wall told me on the
|
||
phone, using the local term for foreign devil. Daily is American, 2
|
||
meters tall, blond, blue-eyed, khaki-and-polo-shirted, gregarious,
|
||
absolutely plain-spoken, and almost always seems to be having a great
|
||
time. Wall is English, shorter, dark-haired, impeccably suited, cagey,
|
||
reticent, and dry. Both are in their 50s. It is of some significance to
|
||
this story that, at the end of the day, these two men unwind by sitting
|
||
out in the rain and hoisting a beer, paying no attention whatsoever to
|
||
the industrial-scale whorehouse next door. Both of them have seen many
|
||
young Western men arrive here on business missions and completely lose
|
||
control of their sphincters and become impediments to any kind of
|
||
organized activity. Daily hired Wall because, like Daily, he is a stable
|
||
family man who has his act together. They are the very definition of a
|
||
complementary relationship, and they seem to be making excellent
|
||
progress toward their goal, which is to run two really expensive wires
|
||
across the Malay Peninsula.
|
||
|
||
Since these two, and many of the others we will meet on this journey,
|
||
have much in common with one another, this is as good a place as any to
|
||
write a general description. They tend to come from the US or the
|
||
British Commonwealth countries but spend very little time living there.
|
||
They are cheerful and outgoing, rudely humorous, and frequently have
|
||
long-term marriages to adaptable wives. They tend to be absolutely
|
||
straight shooters even when they are talking to a hacker tourist about
|
||
whom they know nothing. Their openness would probably be career suicide
|
||
in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life
|
||
in the United States today. On the other hand, if I had an unlimited
|
||
amount of money and woke up tomorrow morning with a burning desire to
|
||
see a 2,000-hole golf course erected on the surface of Mars, I would
|
||
probably call men like Daily and Wall, do a handshake deal with them,
|
||
send them a blank check, and not worry about it.
|
||
|
||
Daily works out of Bangkok, the place where banks are headquartered,
|
||
contracts are written, and 50-ton cranes are to be had. Alan "the
|
||
ferang" Wall lives in Ban Hat Yai, the center of the FLAG operation in
|
||
Thailand, cruising the cable routes a couple of times a week,
|
||
materializing unpredictably in the heart of the tropical jungle in a
|
||
perfectly tailored dark suit to inspect, among other things, FLAG's
|
||
chain of manhole-making villages.
|
||
|
||
There were seven of these in existence during the summer of 1996, all
|
||
lying along one of the two highways that run across the isthmus between
|
||
the Andaman and the South China Seas. These highways, incidentally, are
|
||
lined with utility poles carrying both power and communications wires.
|
||
The tops of the poles are guarded by conical baskets about halfway up.
|
||
The baskets prevent rats from scampering up the poles to chew away the
|
||
tasty insulation on the wires and poisonous snakes from slithering up to
|
||
sun themselves on the crossbars, a practice that has been known to cause
|
||
morale problems among line workers.
|
||
|
||
The manhole-making village we are visiting on this fine, steamy summer
|
||
day has a population of some 130 workers plus an unknown number of
|
||
children. The village was founded in the shade of an old, mature rubber
|
||
plantation. Along the highway are piles of construction materials
|
||
deposited by trucks: bundles of half-inch rebar, piles of sand and
|
||
gravel. At one end of the clearing is a double row of shelters made from
|
||
shiny new corrugated metal nailed over wooden frames, where the men,
|
||
women, and children of the village live. On the end of this is an
|
||
open-air office under a lean-to roof, equipped with a whiteboard - just
|
||
like any self-respecting high tech company. Chickens strut around
|
||
flapping their wings uselessly, looking for stuff to peck out of the
|
||
ground.
|
||
|
||
When the day begins, the children are bused off to school, and the men
|
||
and women go to work. The women cut the rebar to length using an
|
||
electric chop saw. The bars are laid out on planks with rows of nails
|
||
sticking out of them to form simple templates. Then the pieces of rebar
|
||
are wired together to create cages perhaps 2 meters high and 1.5 meters
|
||
on a side. Then the carpenters go to work, lining the cage inside and
|
||
out with wooden planks. Finally, 13 metric tons of cement are poured
|
||
into the forms created by the planks. When the planks are taken away,
|
||
the result is a hollow, concrete obelisk with a cylindrical collar
|
||
projecting from the top, with an iron manhole cover set into it. Making
|
||
a manhole takes three weeks.
|
||
|
||
Meanwhile, along the highway, trenches are being dug - quickly scooped
|
||
out of the lowland soil with a backhoe, or, in the mountains,
|
||
laboriously jackhammered into solid rock. A 50-ton crane comes to the
|
||
village, picks up one manhole at a time using lifting loops that the
|
||
villagers built into its top, and sets it on a flatbed truck that
|
||
transports it to one of the wider excavations that are spaced along the
|
||
trench at intervals of 300 to 700 meters. The manholes will allow
|
||
workers to climb down to the level of the buried cable, which will
|
||
stretch through a conduit running under the ground between the manholes.
|
||
|
||
The crane lowers the manhole into the excavation. A couple of
|
||
hard-hatted workers get down there with it and push it this way and
|
||
that, getting it lined up, while other workers up on the edge of the pit
|
||
help out by shoving on it with a big stick. Finally it settles gingerly
|
||
into place, atop its prepoured pad. The foreman clambers in, takes a
|
||
transparent green disposable lighter from his pocket, and sets it down
|
||
sideways on the top of the manhole. The liquid butane inside the lighter
|
||
serves as a fluid level, verifying that the manhole is correctly
|
||
positioned.
|
||
|
||
With a few more hours' work, the conduits have been mated with the tubes
|
||
built into the walls of the manhole and the surrounding excavation
|
||
filled in so that nothing is left except some disturbed earth and a
|
||
manhole cover labeled CAT: Communications Authority of Thailand. The
|
||
eventual result of all this work will be two separate chains of manholes
|
||
(931 of them all told) running parallel to two different highways, each
|
||
chain joined by twin lengths of conduit - one conduit for FLAG and one
|
||
for CAT.
|
||
|
||
Farther west, another crew is at work, burdened with three enormous
|
||
metal spools carrying flexible black plastic conduit having an inside
|
||
diameter of an inch. The three spools are set up on stands near a
|
||
manhole, the three ducts brought together and tied into a neat bundle by
|
||
workers using colorful plastic twine. Meanwhile, others down in the
|
||
manhole are wrestling with the world's most powerful peashooter: a
|
||
massive metal pipe with a screw jack on its butt end. The muzzle of the
|
||
device is inserted into one of the conduits on the manhole wall and the
|
||
screw jack is tightened against the opposite wall to hold it horizontal.
|
||
Next the peashooter is loaded: a big round sponge with a rope tied to it
|
||
is inserted into an opening on its side. The rope comes off a long
|
||
spool. Finally, a hefty air compressor is fired up above ground and its
|
||
outlet tube thrown down into the manhole and patched into a valve on
|
||
this pipe. When the valve is opened, compressed air floods the pipe
|
||
behind the round sponge, which shoots forward like a bullet in a gun
|
||
barrel, pulling the rope behind it and causing the reel to spin wildly
|
||
like deep-sea fishing tackle that has hooked a big tuna.
|
||
|
||
"Next manhole\! Next manhole\!" cries the foreman excitedly, and
|
||
pedestrians, bicyclists, motor scooters, and (if inspectors or hacker
|
||
tourists are present) cars parade down the highway, veering around water
|
||
buffaloes and goats and chickens to the next manhole, some half a
|
||
kilometer away, where a torrent of water, driven before the sponge, is
|
||
blasting out of a conduit and slamming into the opposite wall. One
|
||
length of the conduit can hold some 5 cubic meters of water, and the
|
||
sponge, ramming down the tube like a piston, forces all of it out.
|
||
Finally the sponge pops out of the hole like a pea from a peashooter,
|
||
bringing the rope with it. The rope is used to pull through a thicker
|
||
rope, which is finally connected to the triple bundle of thin duct at
|
||
one end and to a pulling motor at the other. This pulling motor is a
|
||
slowly turning drum with several turns of rope around it.
|
||
|
||
Now the work gets harder: at the manhole with the reels, some workers
|
||
bundle and tie the ducts as they unroll while others, down in the hole,
|
||
bend them around a difficult curve and keep them feeding smoothly into
|
||
the conduit. At the other end, a man works with the puller, keeping the
|
||
tension constant and remaining alert for trouble. Back at the reels, the
|
||
thin duct occasionally gets wedged between loose turns on the reel, and
|
||
everything has to be stopped. Usually this is communicated to the puller
|
||
via walkie-talkie, but when the afternoon rains hit, the walkie-talkies
|
||
don't work as well, and a messenger has to buzz back and forth on a
|
||
motor scooter. But eventually the triple inner duct is pulled through
|
||
both of the conduits, and the whole process can begin again on the next
|
||
segment.
|
||
|
||
Daily and Wall preside over this operation, which is Western at the top
|
||
and pure Thai at the ground level, with a gradual shading of cultures in
|
||
between. FLAG has dealings in many countries, and the arrangement is
|
||
different in each one. Here, the top level is a 50-50 partnership
|
||
between FLAG and Thailand's CAT. They bid the project out to two
|
||
different large contractors, each of whom hired subcontractors with
|
||
particular specialties who work through sub-sub-contractors who hire the
|
||
workers, get them to the site, and make things happen. The incentives
|
||
are shaped at each level so that the contractors will get the job done
|
||
without having to be micromanaged, and the roads seem to be crawling
|
||
with inspectors representing various levels of the project who make sure
|
||
that the work is being done according to spec (at the height of this
|
||
operation, 50 percent of the traffic on some of these roads was
|
||
FLAG-related).
|
||
|
||
The top-level contracts are completely formalized with detailed
|
||
specifications, bid bonds, and so on, and business at this level is done
|
||
in English and in air-conditioned offices. But by the time you get to
|
||
the bottom layer, work is being done by people who, although presumably
|
||
just as intelligent as the big shots, are fluent only in Thai and not
|
||
especially literate in any language, running around in rubber
|
||
flip-flops, doing business on a handshake, pulling wads of bills out of
|
||
their pockets when necessary to pay for some supplies or get drinks
|
||
brought in. Consequently, the way in which the work is performed bears
|
||
no resemblance whatsoever to the way it would be done in the United
|
||
States or any other developed country. It is done the Thai way.
|
||
|
||
Not one but two entirely separate pairs of conduits are being created in
|
||
this fashion. Both of them run from the idyllic sandy beach of Ban Pak
|
||
Bara on the west to the paradisiacal sandy beach of Songkhla on the east
|
||
- both of them are constructed in the same way, to the same
|
||
specifications. Both of them run along highways. The southern route
|
||
takes the obvious path, paralleling a road that runs in a relatively
|
||
straight line between the two endpoints for 170 kilometers. But the
|
||
other route jogs sharply northward just out of Ban Pak Bara, runs up the
|
||
coast for some distance, turns east, and climbs up over the bony spine
|
||
of the peninsula, then turns south again and finally reaches Songkhla
|
||
after meandering for some 270 kilometers. Unlike the southern route,
|
||
which passes almost exclusively over table-flat paddy land, easily
|
||
excavated with a backhoe, the northern route goes for many kilometers
|
||
over solid rock, which must be trenched with jackhammers and other heavy
|
||
artillery, filled with galvanized steel conduit, and then backfilled
|
||
with gravel and concrete.
|
||
|
||
This raises questions. The questions turn out to have interesting
|
||
answers. I'll summarize them first and then go into detail. Q: Why
|
||
bother running two widely separated routes over theMalay Peninsula?
|
||
|
||
A: Because Thailand, like everywhere else in the world, is full ofidiots
|
||
with backhoes.
|
||
|
||
Q: Isn't that a pain in the ass?
|
||
|
||
A: You have no idea.
|
||
|
||
Q: Why not just go south around Singapore and keep the cable in the
|
||
water, then?
|
||
|
||
A: Because Singapore is controlled by the enemy.
|
||
|
||
Q: Who is the enemy?
|
||
|
||
A: FLAG's enemies are legion.
|
||
|
||
The reason for the difficult northern route is FLAG's pursuit of
|
||
diversity, which in this case is not a politically correct buzzword
|
||
(though FLAG also has plenty of that kind of diversity) but refers to
|
||
the principle that one should have multiple, redundant paths to make the
|
||
system more robust. Diversity is not needed in the deep ocean, but land
|
||
crossings are viewed as considerably more risky. So FLAG decided, early
|
||
on, to lay two independent cables on two different routes, instead of
|
||
one.
|
||
|
||
The indefatigable Jim Daily, along with his redoubtable inspector Ruzee,
|
||
drove us along every kilometer of both of these routes over the course
|
||
of a day and a half. "Let me ask you a naïve question," I said to him,
|
||
once I got a load of the big rock ridge he was getting ready to cut a
|
||
trench through. "Why not just put one cable on one side of that southern
|
||
highway and another cable on the opposite side?" I found it hard to
|
||
imagine a backhoe cutting through both sides of the highway at once."
|
||
|
||
They just wanted to be sure that there was no conceivable disaster that
|
||
could wipe out both routes at the same time," he shrugged.
|
||
|
||
FLAG has envisioned every possible paranoid disaster scenario that could
|
||
lead to a failure of a cable segment and has laid action plans that will
|
||
be implemented if this should happen. For example, it has made deals
|
||
with its competitors so that it can buy capacity from them, if it has
|
||
to, while it repairs a break (likewise, the competitors might reserve
|
||
capacity from FLAG for the same reason). Despite all this, FLAG is
|
||
saying in this case: "We are going to cut a trench across a 50-mile-wide
|
||
piece of rock because we think it will make our cable infinitesimally
|
||
more reliable." Essentially, they have to do it, because otherwise no
|
||
one will entrust valuable bits to their cable system.
|
||
|
||
Why didn't they keep it in the water? Opinions vary on this: pro-FLAG
|
||
people argue that the Straits, with all of their ship traffic, are a
|
||
relatively hazardous place to put a submarine cable and that a
|
||
terrestrial crossing of the Malay Peninsula is a tactical masterstroke.
|
||
FLAG skeptics will tell you that the terrestrial crossing is a necessity
|
||
imposed on them because Singapore Telecom made the decision that they
|
||
didn't want to be connected to FLAG.
|
||
|
||
Instead, Singapore Telecom and France Telecom have been promoting
|
||
SEA-ME-WE 3, that Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 3 cable, a
|
||
system whose target date is 1999, two years later than FLAG. SEA-ME-WE 1
|
||
and 2 run from France to Singapore and 3 was originally planned to cover
|
||
the same territory, but now its organizers have gotten other telecoms,
|
||
such as British Telecom, involved. They hope that SEA-ME-WE 3 will
|
||
continue north from Singapore as far as Japan, and north from France to
|
||
Great Britain, covering generally the same route as FLAG. FLAG and
|
||
SEA-ME-WE 3 are, therefore, direct competitors.
|
||
|
||
The competition is not just between two different wires. It is a
|
||
competition between two entirely different systems of doing business,
|
||
two entirely different visions of how the telecommunications industry
|
||
should work. It is a competition, also, between AT\&T (the juggernaut of
|
||
the field, and the power behind most telecom-backed systems) and Nynex
|
||
(the Baby Bell with an Oedipus complex and the power behind FLAG). Nynex
|
||
and AT\&T have their offices a short distance from each other in
|
||
Manhattan, but the war between them is being fought in trenches in
|
||
Thailand, glass office towers in Tokyo, and dusty government ministries
|
||
in Egypt.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ The origin of FLAG\_\_
|
||
|
||
Kessler Marketing Intelligence Corp. (KMI) is a Newport, Rhode Island,
|
||
company that has developed a specialty in tracking the worldwide
|
||
submarine cable system. This is not a trivial job, since there are at
|
||
least 320 cable systems in operation around the world, with old ones
|
||
being retired and new ones being laid all the time. KMI makes money from
|
||
this by selling a document titled "Worldwide Summary of Fiberoptic
|
||
Submarine Systems" that will set you back about US$4,500 but that is a
|
||
must-read for anyone wanting to operate in that business. Compiling and
|
||
maintaining this document gives a rare Olympian perspective on the world
|
||
communications system.
|
||
|
||
In the late 1980s, as KMI looked at the cables then in existence and the
|
||
systems that were slated for the next few years, they noticed an almost
|
||
monstrous imbalance.
|
||
|
||
The United States would, by the late 1990s, be massively connected to
|
||
Europe by some 200,000 circuits across the Atlantic, and just as
|
||
massively connected to Asia by a roughly equal number of circuits across
|
||
the Pacific. But between Europe and Asia there would be fewer than
|
||
20,000 circuits.
|
||
|
||
Cables have always been financed and built by telecoms, which until very
|
||
recently have always been government-backed monopolies. In the business,
|
||
these are variously referred to as PTTs (Post, Telephone, and
|
||
Telegraphs) or PTAs (Post and Telecom Authorities) or simply as "the
|
||
clubs." The dominant club has long been AT\&T - especially in the years
|
||
since World War II, when most of the international telecommunications
|
||
system was built.
|
||
|
||
Traditionally, the way a cable system gets built is that AT\&T meets
|
||
with other PTTs along the proposed route to negotiate terms (although in
|
||
the opinion of some informed people who don't work for AT\&T, "dictate"
|
||
comes closer to the truth than "negotiate"). The capital needed to
|
||
construct the cable system is ponied up by the various PTTs along its
|
||
route, which, consequently, end up collectively owning the cable and all
|
||
of its capacity. This is a tidy enough arrangement as those telecoms
|
||
traditionally "own" all of the customers within their borders and can
|
||
charge them whatever it takes to pay for all of those cables. Cables
|
||
built this way are now called "club cables."
|
||
|
||
Given America's postwar dominance of the world economy and AT\&T's
|
||
dominance of the communications system, it becomes much easier to
|
||
understand the huge bandwidth imbalance that the analysts at KMI
|
||
noticed. Actually, it would be surprising if this imbalance didn't
|
||
exist. If the cable industry worked on anything like a free-market
|
||
basis, this howling chasm in bandwidth between Europe and Asia would be
|
||
an obvious opportunity for entrepreneurs. Since the system was, in fact,
|
||
controlled by government monopolies, and since the biggest of those
|
||
monopolies had no particular interest in building a cable that entirely
|
||
bypassed its territory, nothing was likely to happen.
|
||
|
||
But then something did happen. KMI, whose entire business is founded on
|
||
knowing and understanding the market, was ideally positioned, not just
|
||
to be aware of this situation, but also to crunch the numbers and figure
|
||
out whether it constituted a workable business opportunity. In 1989, it
|
||
published a study on worldwide undersea fiber-optic systems that
|
||
included some such calculations. Based on reasonable assumptions about
|
||
the cost of the system, its working lifetime, and the present cost of
|
||
communications on similar systems, KMI reckoned that if a
|
||
state-of-the-art cable were laid from the United Kingdom to the Middle
|
||
East it would pay back its investors in two to five years. Setting aside
|
||
for a moment the fact that it went against all the traditions of the
|
||
industry, there was no reason in principle why a privately financed
|
||
cable could not be constructed to fill this demand. Investors would pool
|
||
the capital, just as they would for any other kind of business venture.
|
||
They would buy the cable, pay to have it installed, sell the capacity to
|
||
local customers, and make money for their shareholders.
|
||
|
||
The study was read by Gulf Associates, a group of New York-based moneyed
|
||
Iranian expats who are always looking for good investments. Gulf
|
||
Associates checked out KMI's prefeasibility study to get an idea of what
|
||
the parameters of such a system would be. Based on that, other
|
||
companies, such as Dallah Al-Baraka (a Saudi investment company),
|
||
Marubeni Corp. (a Tokyo trading company), and Nynex got involved. The
|
||
nascent consortium paid KMI to perform a full feasibility study. Neil
|
||
Tagare, the former vice president for KMI, visited 25 countries to
|
||
determine their level of need for such a cable. The feasibility study
|
||
was completed in late 1990 and looked favorable. The consortium grew to
|
||
include the Asian Infrastructure Fund of Hong Kong and Telecom Holding
|
||
Co. Ltd. of Thailand. The scope of the project grew also, extending not
|
||
just to the Middle East but all the way to Tokyo.
|
||
|
||
Nynex took on the role of managing sponsor for the FLAG project. A new
|
||
company called Nynex Network Systems (Bermuda) Ltd. was formed to serve
|
||
as the worldwide sales representative for FLAG, and FLAG's world
|
||
headquarters was sited in Bermuda. This might seem a bit peculiar given
|
||
that none of the money comes from Bermuda, the cable goes nowhere near
|
||
Bermuda, and Nynex is centered in the northeastern United States. But
|
||
since FLAG is ultimately owned and controlled by a Bermuda company and
|
||
the capacity on the cable is sold out of Bermuda, the invoices all come
|
||
out of Bermuda and the money all comes into Bermuda, which by an odd
|
||
coincidence happens to be a major corporate tax haven.
|
||
|
||
Nynex also has responsibility for building the FLAG cable system. One
|
||
might think that a Baby Bell such as Nynex would be a perfect choice for
|
||
this kind of work, but, in fact, Nynex owned none of the factories
|
||
needed to manufacture cable, none of the ships needed to lay it, and not
|
||
enough of the expertise needed to install it. Nynex does know a thing or
|
||
two about laying and operating terrestrial cable systems - during the
|
||
mid-1990s, for example, it wired large parts of the United Kingdom with
|
||
a "cable television" system that is actually a generalized digital
|
||
communication network. But transoceanic submarine cables were outside of
|
||
its traditional realm.
|
||
|
||
On the other hand, during the early '90s, Nynex found itself stymied
|
||
from competing in the United States because of regulatory hassles and
|
||
began looking overseas for markets in which to expand. By the time FLAG
|
||
was conceived, therefore, Nynex had begun to gain experience in the
|
||
countless pitfalls of doing business in the worldwide telecommunications
|
||
business, making up a little bit of AT\&T's daunting lead.
|
||
|
||
FLAG's business arrangements were entirely novel. The entire FLAG
|
||
concept was unfeasible unless agreements could be made with so-called
|
||
landing parties in each country along the route. The landing party is
|
||
the company that owns the station where the cable comes ashore and
|
||
operates the equipment that patches it into the local telecommunications
|
||
system. The obvious choice for such a role would be a PTT. But many PTTs
|
||
were reluctant to participate, partly because this novel arrangement
|
||
struck them as dubious and partly because they weren't going to end up
|
||
monopolizing the cable.
|
||
|
||
Overcoming such opposition was essentially a sales job. John
|
||
Mercogliano, a high-intensity New Yorker who is now vice president -
|
||
Europe, Nynex Network Systems (Bermuda) Ltd., developed a sales pitch
|
||
that he delivers too rapidly for any hacker tourist to write down but
|
||
goes something like this: "In the old days AT\&T came in, told you how
|
||
much to pay, and you raised the money, assumed all of the risk, and
|
||
owned the cable. But now FLAG's coming in with investors who are going
|
||
to put in $600 million of their own cash and borrow a billion more
|
||
without any guaranteed sales, assuming all of the risk. You buy only as
|
||
much capacity on FLAG as you want, and meanwhile you have retained your
|
||
capital, which you can use to upgrade your outdated local infrastructure
|
||
and provide better service to your customers - now what the hell is
|
||
wrong with that?"
|
||
|
||
The question hangs in the air provocatively. What the hell is wrong with
|
||
it? Put this way, it seems unbeatable. But a lot of local telecoms
|
||
turned FLAG down anyway - at least at first. Why?
|
||
|
||
The short answer is that I'm not allowed to tell you. The long answer
|
||
requires an explanation of how a hacker tourist operates; how his
|
||
methods differ from those of an actual journalist; and just how weird
|
||
the global telecom business is nowadays.
|
||
|
||
Let's take the last one first. The business is so tangled that no pure
|
||
competition exists. There are no Coke-versus-Pepsi dichotomies. Most of
|
||
the companies mentioned in this story are actually whole families of
|
||
companies, and most of those have their fingers in pies in dozens of
|
||
countries all around the globe. Any two companies that compete in one
|
||
arena are, at the same time, probably in bed with each other on many
|
||
other levels. As badly as they might want to slag each other in the
|
||
press, they dare not.
|
||
|
||
So, like those "high-ranking officials" you're always reading about in
|
||
news reports from Washington, they all talk on background. Anyone who
|
||
wants to write about this business will come off as either a genius with
|
||
an encyclopedic brain or a pathological liar with an axe to grind -
|
||
depending on the reader's point of view - because all truly interesting
|
||
information is dished out strictly on background.
|
||
|
||
Perhaps a real journalist would go into Woodward-and-Bernstein mode,
|
||
find a Deep Throat, and lay it all bare. But I'm not a real journalist:
|
||
I'm a hacker tourist, and trying to work up an exposé on monopolistic
|
||
behavior by big bad telecoms would only get in the way of what are, to
|
||
me, the more interesting aspects of this story.
|
||
|
||
So I'll just say that a whole lot of important and well-informed people
|
||
in the telecom business, all over the planet, are laboring under the
|
||
strange impression that AT\&T used its power and influence to discourage
|
||
smaller telecoms in other countries from signing deals with FLAG.
|
||
|
||
In the old days, this would have prevented FLAG from ever coming into
|
||
existence. But these are the new days, telecom deregulation is creeping
|
||
slowly across the planet, and many PTTs now have to worry about
|
||
competition. So the results of the FLAG sales pitch varied from country
|
||
to country. In some places, like Singapore, FLAG never made an agreement
|
||
with anyone and had to bypass the country entirely. In other places, the
|
||
PTT broke ranks with AT\&T and agreed to land FLAG. In others, the PTT
|
||
turned it down but an upstart competitor decided to land FLAG instead,
|
||
and in still others, the PTT declined at first, and then got so worried
|
||
about the upstart competitor that it changed its mind and decided to
|
||
land FLAG after all.
|
||
|
||
It would be very easy for you, dear reader, to underestimate what a sea
|
||
change this all represents for the clubs. They are not accustomed to
|
||
having to worry about competition - it doesn't come naturally to them.
|
||
The typical high-ranking telecom executive is more of a government
|
||
bureaucrat than a businessperson, and the entire scenario laid out above
|
||
is irregular, messy, and disturbing to someone like that. A telecrat's
|
||
reflex is to assume, smugly, that new carriers simply don't matter,
|
||
because no matter how much financing and business acumen they may have,
|
||
no matter how great the demand for their services may be, and no matter
|
||
how crappy the existing service is, the old PTT still controls the
|
||
cable, which is the only way to get bits out of the country. But in the
|
||
FLAG era, if the customers go to another carrier, that carrier will find
|
||
a way to get the needed capacity somehow - at which point it is too late
|
||
for the PTT.
|
||
|
||
The local carriers, therefore, need to stop thinking globally and start
|
||
thinking locally. That is, they need to leave long-range cable laying to
|
||
the entrepreneurs, to assume that the bandwidth will always somehow be
|
||
there, and to concentrate on upgrading the quality of their customer
|
||
service - in particular, the so-called last mile, the local loop that
|
||
ties customers into the Net.
|
||
|
||
By the end of 1994, FLAG's Construction and Maintenance Agreement had
|
||
been signed, and the project was for real. Well before this point, it
|
||
had become obvious to everyone that FLAG was going to happen in some
|
||
form, so companies that initially might have been hostile began looking
|
||
for ways to get in on the action. The manufacture of the cable and the
|
||
repeaters had been put out to bid in 1993 and had turned into a
|
||
competition between two consortia, one consisting of AT\&T Submarine
|
||
Systems and KDD Submarine Cable Systems, and the other formed around
|
||
Alcatel and Fujitsu. The former group ended up landing the contract. So
|
||
AT\&T, which evidently felt threatened by the whole premise of the FLAG
|
||
project and according to some people had tried to quash it, ended up
|
||
with part of the contract to manufacture the cable.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ In which the Hacker Tourist returns (temporarily) to British soil
|
||
in the Far East. The (temporary) center of the cable-laying universe.
|
||
Hoisting flagons with the élite cable-laying fraternity\_\_
|
||
|
||
at a waterfront establishment. Classic reprise of the ancient
|
||
hacker-versus-suit drama.Historical exploits of the famous William
|
||
Thomson and the infamous Wildman Whitehouse. Their rivalry, culminating
|
||
in the destruction of the first transatlantic cable. Whitehouse
|
||
disgraced, Thomson transmogrified into Lord Kelvin ....
|
||
|
||
\_\_ 22° 15.745' N, 114° 0.557' ESilvermine Bay, Lan Tao Island,?b\>
|
||
Hong Kong\_\_
|
||
|
||
"Today, Lan Tao Island is the center of the cable-laying universe," says
|
||
David M. Handley, a 52-year-old Southerner who, like virtually all
|
||
cable-laying people, is talkative, endlessly energetic, and gives every
|
||
indication of knowing exactly what he's doing. "Tomorrow, it'll be
|
||
someplace else." We are chug-a-lugging large bottles of water on a
|
||
public beach at Tong Fuk on the southern coast of Lan Tao, which is a
|
||
relatively large (25 kilometers long) island an hour's ferry ride west
|
||
of Hong Kong Island. Arrayed before us on the bay is a collection of
|
||
vessels that, to a layman, wouldn't look like the center of a decent
|
||
salvage yard, to say nothing of the cable-laying universe. But remember
|
||
that "layman" is just a polite word for "idiot."
|
||
|
||
Closest to shore, there are a couple of junks and sampans. Mind you,
|
||
these are not picturesque James Clavell junks with red sails or Pearl
|
||
Buck sampans with pole-wielding peasants in conical hats. The terms are
|
||
now used to describe modern, motorized vessels built vaguely along the
|
||
same lines to perform roughly the same functions: a junk is a large,
|
||
square-assed vessel, and a sampan is a small utility craft with an
|
||
enclosed cabin. Farther out, there are two barges: slabs with cranes and
|
||
boxy things on them. Finally, there are several of what Handley calls
|
||
LBRBs (Little Bitty Rubber Boats) going back and forth between these
|
||
vessels and the beach. Boeing hydrofoils and turbo cats scream back and
|
||
forth a few miles out, ferrying passengers among various destinations
|
||
around the Pearl Delta region. It's a hot day, and kids are swimming on
|
||
the public beach, prudently staying within the line of red buoys marking
|
||
the antishark net. Handley remarks, offhandedly, that five people have
|
||
been eaten so far this year. A bulletin board, in English and Chinese,
|
||
offers advice: "If schooling fish start to congregate in unusually large
|
||
numbers, leave the water."
|
||
|
||
This bay is the center of the cable-laying universe because cable layers
|
||
have congregated here in unusually large numbers and because of those
|
||
two barges, which are a damn sight more complicated and expensive than
|
||
you would ever guess from looking at them. These men (they are all men)
|
||
and equipment have come from all over the world, to land not only FLAG
|
||
but also, at the same time, another of those third-generation
|
||
fiber-optic cables, APCN (Asia-Pacific Cable Network).
|
||
|
||
In contrast to other places we visited, virtually no local labor is
|
||
being used on Lan Tao. There is hardly a Chinese face to be seen around
|
||
the work site, and when you do see an Asian it tends to be either an
|
||
Indonesian member of a barge crew or a Singaporean of Chinese or Indian
|
||
ancestry. Most of the people here are blue-eyed and sunburned. A good
|
||
half of them have accents that originate from the British Isles. The
|
||
remainder are from the States (frequently Dixie), Australia, or New
|
||
Zealand, with a smattering from France and Germany.
|
||
|
||
Both FLAG and APCN are just passing through Hong Kong, not terminating
|
||
here, and so each has to be landed twice (one segment coming in and one
|
||
segment going back out). In FLAG's case, one segment goes south to
|
||
Songkhla, Thailand, and the other goes north toward Shanghai and Korea.
|
||
It wouldn't be safe to land both segments in the same place, so there
|
||
are two separate landing sites, with FLAG and APCN cables running side
|
||
by side at each one. One of the sites is at the public beach, which is
|
||
nice and sandy. The other site is a few hundred meters away on a cobble
|
||
beach - a hill of rounded stones, fist- to football-sized, rising up out
|
||
of the surf and making musical clinking noises as the waves smash them
|
||
up and down the grade. This is a terrible place to land a cable
|
||
(Handley: "If it was easy, everybody would do it\!") but, as in
|
||
Thailand, diversity is the ultimate trump card. Planted above the hill
|
||
of cobbles is a brand-new cable station bearing the Hong Kong Telecom
|
||
logo, only one of the spoils soon to be reaped by the People's Republic
|
||
of China when all this reverts to its control next year.
|
||
|
||
Lan Tao Island, like most other places where cables are landed, is a
|
||
peculiar area, long home to smugglers and pirates. Some 30,000 people
|
||
live here, mostly concentrated around Silvermine Bay on the island's
|
||
eastern end, where the ferries come in every hour or so from Hong Kong's
|
||
central district, carrying both islanders and tourists. The beaches are
|
||
lovely, except for the sharks, and the interior of the island is mostly
|
||
unspoiled parkland, popular among hikers. Hong Kong's new airport is
|
||
being built on reclaimed land attached to the north side of the island,
|
||
and a monumental chain of bridges and tunnels is being constructed to
|
||
connect it with the city. Other than tourist attractions, the island
|
||
hosts a few oddities such as a prison, a Trappist monastery, a village
|
||
on stilts, and the world's largest outdoor bronze Buddha.
|
||
|
||
Cable trash, as these characters affectionately call themselves, shuttle
|
||
back and forth between Tong Fuk and Silvermine Bay. They all stay at the
|
||
same hotel and tend to spend their off hours at Papa Doc's (no relation
|
||
to the Haitian dictator), a beachfront bar run by expats (British) for
|
||
expats (Australians, Americans, Brits, you name it). Papa Doc's isn't
|
||
just for cable layers. It also meets the exacting specifications of
|
||
exhausted hacker tourists. It's the kind of joint that Humphrey Bogart
|
||
would be running if he had washed ashore on Lan Tao in the mid-1990s
|
||
wearing a nose ring instead of landing in Casablanca in the 1940s
|
||
wearing a fedora.
|
||
|
||
One evening, after Handley and I had been buying each other drinks at
|
||
Papa Doc's for a while, he raised his glass and said, "To good times and
|
||
great cable laying\!" This toast, while no doubt uttered with a certain
|
||
amount of irony, speaks volumes about cable professionals.
|
||
|
||
For most of them, good times and great cable laying are one and the
|
||
same. They make their living doing the kind of work that automatically
|
||
weeds out losers. Handley, for example, was a founding member of SEAL
|
||
Team 2 who spent 59 months fighting in Vietnam, laid cables for the Navy
|
||
for a few more years, and has done similar work in the civilian world
|
||
ever since. In addition to being an expert diver, he has a master
|
||
mariner's license good up to 1,500 tons, which is not an easy thing to
|
||
get or maintain. He does all his work on a laptop (he claims that it
|
||
replaced 14 employees) and is as computer-literate as anyone I've known
|
||
who isn't a coder.
|
||
|
||
Handley is unusual in combining all of these qualities into one person
|
||
(that's why he's the boss of the Lan Tao Island operation), but the
|
||
qualities are as common as tattoos and Tevas around the tables of Papa
|
||
Doc's. The crews of the cable barges tend to be jacks-of-all-trades:
|
||
ship's masters who also know how to dive using various types of
|
||
breathing rigs or who can slam out a report on their laptops, embed a
|
||
few digital images in it, and email it to the other side of the world
|
||
over a satellite phone, then pick up a welding torch and go to work on
|
||
the barge. If these people didn't know what they were doing, there's a
|
||
good chance they would be dead by now or would have screwed up a cable
|
||
lay somewhere and washed out of the industry.
|
||
|
||
Most of the ones here work on what amounts to a freelance basis, either
|
||
on their own or as part of small firms. Handley, for example, is
|
||
Director of Technical Services for the ITR Corporation, which, among
|
||
other functions, serves as a sort of talent agency for cable-layers,
|
||
matching supply of expertise to demand and facilitating contracts. Most
|
||
of the divers are freelancers, hired temporarily by companies that
|
||
likewise move from one job to another. The business is as close to being
|
||
a pure meritocracy as anything ever gets in the real world, and it's
|
||
only because these guys know they are good that they have the confidence
|
||
to call themselves cable trash.
|
||
|
||
It was not always thus. Until very recently, cable-laying talent was
|
||
monopolized by the clubs. This worked just fine when every cable was a
|
||
club cable, created by monopolies for monopolies. In the last couple of
|
||
years, however, two changes have occurred at once: FLAG, the first major
|
||
privately financed cable, came along; and at the same time, many
|
||
experienced cable layers began to go into business for themselves,
|
||
either because of voluntary retirement or downsizing. There clearly is a
|
||
synergy between these two trends.
|
||
|
||
The roster of FLAG's Tong Fuk cable lay contains around 44 people, half
|
||
of whom are crew members on either the cable barge Elbe or the
|
||
accompanying tug Ocean East. The rest of them are here representing
|
||
various contractors involved in the project. It would be safe to assume
|
||
that at least that many are working on the APCN side for a grand total
|
||
of around 100.
|
||
|
||
The size of the fraternity of cable layers is estimated by Handley to be
|
||
less than 500, and the number is not increasing. A majority work full
|
||
time for one of the clubs. Perhaps a couple of hundred of them are
|
||
freelancers, though this fraction gives every indication of rising as
|
||
the club employees resign and go to work as contractors, frequently
|
||
doing the same work for the same company. "No one can afford to hire
|
||
these folks for long periods of time," Handley says. But their pay is
|
||
not exceptionally high: benefits, per diem, and expenses plus a daily
|
||
rate - but a day might be anything from 0 to 24 hours of work. For a
|
||
diver the rate might be $200 per day; for the master of a barge, tug, or
|
||
beach $300; and for the experts running the show and repping for
|
||
contractors or customers it's in the range of $300 to $400.
|
||
|
||
The arrival of a shore-landing operation at a place like Lan Tao Island
|
||
must look something like this to the locals: suddenly, it is difficult
|
||
to obtain hotel rooms because a plethora of small, unheard-of offshore
|
||
corporations have blocked out a couple of dozen rooms for a couple
|
||
hundred nights. Sunburned Anglos begin to arrive, wearing T-shirts and
|
||
carrying luggage emblazoned with the logos of Alcatel, AT\&T, or Cable &
|
||
Wireless. They fly in from all points of the compass, speaking in
|
||
Southern drawls or Australian twangs or Scottish burrs and sometimes
|
||
bringing their wives or girlfriends, not infrequently Thai or Filipina.
|
||
The least important of them has a laptop and a cell phone, but most have
|
||
more advanced stuff like portable printers, GPS units, and that ultimate
|
||
personal communications device, the satellite telephone, which works
|
||
anywhere on the planet, even in the middle of the ocean, by beaming the
|
||
call straight up to a satellite.
|
||
|
||
Sample conversation at Papa Doc's:
|
||
|
||
Envious hacker tourist: "How much does one of those satellite phones
|
||
cost, anyway?"
|
||
|
||
Leathery, veteran cable layer: "Who gives a shit?"
|
||
|
||
Within a day or two, the cable layers have established an official
|
||
haunt: preferably a place equipped with a dartboard and a few other
|
||
amenities very close to the waterfront so they can keep an eye on
|
||
incoming traffic. There they can get a bite to eat or a drink and pay
|
||
for it on the spot so that when their satellite phones ring or when a
|
||
tugboat chugs into the bay, they can immediately dash off to work. These
|
||
men work and play at completely erratic and unpredictable hours. They
|
||
wear shorts and sandals and T-shirts and frequently sport tattoos and
|
||
hence could easily be mistaken, at a glance, for vacationing sailors.
|
||
But if you can get someone to turn down the volume on the jukebox, you
|
||
can overhear them learnedly discoursing on flaw propagation in the
|
||
crystalline structure of boron silicate glass or on seasonal variation
|
||
of currents in the Pearl River estuary, or on what a pain in the ass it
|
||
is to helm a large ship through the Suez Canal. Their conversation is
|
||
filled with references to places like Tunisia, Diego Garcia, the North
|
||
Sea, Porthcurno, and Penang.
|
||
|
||
One day a barge appears off the cove, and there is a lot of fussing
|
||
around with floats, lots of divers in the water. A backhoe digs a trench
|
||
in the cobble beach. A long skinny black thing is wrestled ashore.
|
||
Working almost naked in the tropical heat, the men bolt segmented pipes
|
||
around it and then bury it. It is never again to be seen by human eyes.
|
||
Suddenly, all of these men pay their bills and vanish. Not long
|
||
afterward, the phone service gets a hell of a lot better.
|
||
|
||
On land, the tools of cable laying are the tools of civil engineers:
|
||
backhoes, shovels, cranes. The job is a matter of digging a ditch,
|
||
laying duct, planting manholes. The complications are sometimes
|
||
geographical but mostly political. In deep water, where the majority of
|
||
FLAG is located, the work is done by cable ships and has more in common
|
||
with space exploration than with any terrestrial activity. These two
|
||
realms could hardly be more different, and yet the transition between
|
||
them - the shore landing - is completely distinct from both.
|
||
|
||
Shallow water is the most perilous part of a cable's route. Extra
|
||
precautions must be taken in the transition from deep water to the
|
||
beach, and these precautions get more extreme as the water gets more
|
||
shallow. Between 1,000 and 3,000 meters, the cable has a single layer of
|
||
armor wires (steel rods about as thick as a pencil) around it. In less
|
||
than 1,000 meters of water, it has a second layer of armor around the
|
||
first. In the final approach to the shoreline, this double-armored cable
|
||
is contained within a massive shell of articulated cast-iron pipe, which
|
||
in turn is buried under up to a meter of sand.
|
||
|
||
The articulated pipe comes in sections half a meter long, which have to
|
||
be manually fit around the cable and bolted together. Each section of
|
||
pipe interlocks with the ones on either end of it. The coupling is
|
||
designed to bend a certain amount so that the cable can be snaked around
|
||
any obstructions to its destination: the beach manhole. It will bend
|
||
only so much, however, so that the cable's minimum radius of curvature
|
||
will not be violated.
|
||
|
||
At the sandy beach this manual work was done out in the surf by a team
|
||
of English freelance divers based out of Hong Kong. At the cobble beach,
|
||
it was done in a trench by a bikini-underwear-clad Frenchman with a New
|
||
Zealand passport living in Singapore, working in Hong Kong, with a
|
||
Singaporean wife of Chinese descent. Drenched with sweat and rain and
|
||
seawater, he wrestles with the cast-iron pipe sections in a cobblestone
|
||
ditch, bolting them patiently together. A Chinese man in a suit picks
|
||
his way across the cobbles toward him, carrying an oversized umbrella
|
||
emblazoned with the logo of a prominent stock brokerage, followed by a
|
||
minion. Although this is all happening in China, this is the first
|
||
Chinese person who has appeared on the beach in a couple of days. He is
|
||
an executive from the phone company, coming to inspect the work. After a
|
||
stiff exchange of pleasantries with the other cable layers on the beach,
|
||
he goes to the brink of the trench and begins bossing around the man
|
||
with the half-pipes, who, knowing what's good for him, just keeps his
|
||
mouth shut while maintaining a certain bearing and dignity beside which
|
||
the executive's suit and umbrella seem pathetic and vain.
|
||
|
||
To a hacker tourist, the scene is strikingly familiar: it is the ancient
|
||
hacker-versus-suit drama, enacted for the millionth time but sticking to
|
||
its traditional structure as strictly as a Noh play or, for that matter,
|
||
a Dilbert cartoon. Cable layers, like hackers, scorn credentials,
|
||
etiquette, and nice clothes. Anyone who can do the work is part of the
|
||
club. Nothing else matters. Suits are a bizarre intrusion from an
|
||
irrational world. They have undeniable authority, but heaven only knows
|
||
how they acquired it. This year, the suits are from Hong Kong, which
|
||
means they are probably smarter than the average suit. Pretty soon the
|
||
suits will be from Beijing, but Beijing doesn't know how to lay cable
|
||
either, so if they ever want to get bits in or out of their country,
|
||
they will have to reach an understanding with these guys.
|
||
|
||
At Tong Fuk, FLAG is encased in pipe out to a distance of some 300
|
||
meters from the beach manhole. When the divers have got all of that pipe
|
||
bolted on, which will take a week or so, they will make their way down
|
||
the line with a water jet that works by fluidizing the seabed beneath
|
||
it, turning it into quicksand. The pipe sinks into the quicksand, which
|
||
eventually compacts, leaving no trace of the buried pipe.
|
||
|
||
Beyond 300 meters, the cable must still be buried to protect it from
|
||
anchors, tickler chains, and otter boards (more about this later). This
|
||
is the job of the two barges we saw off Tong Fuk. One, the Elbe, was
|
||
burying FLAG. The other was burying APCN. Elbe did its job in one-third
|
||
the time, with one-third the crew, perhaps exemplifying the difference
|
||
between FLAG's freelance-based virtual-corporation business model versus
|
||
the old club model. The Elbe crew is German, British, Filipino,
|
||
Singaporean-of-Indian-ancestry, New Zealander, and also includes a South
|
||
African diver.
|
||
|
||
In the center of the barge is a tank where the cable is spooled. The
|
||
thick, heavy armored cable that the Elbe works with is covered with a
|
||
jacket of tarred jute, which gives it an old-fashioned look that belies
|
||
its high tech optical-fiber innards. The tar likes to melt and stick the
|
||
cable together, so each layer of cable in the tank is separated from its
|
||
neighbors by wooden slats, and buckets of talc are slathered over it.
|
||
The cable emerges from the open top of the tank and passes through a
|
||
series of rollers that curve around, looking very much like a miniature
|
||
roller-coaster track - these are built in such a way as to bend the
|
||
cable through a particular trajectory without violating its minimum
|
||
radius of curvature. They feed it into the top of the injector unit.
|
||
|
||
The injector is a huge steel cleaver, 7 meters high and 2 or 3 meters
|
||
broad, rigged to the side of the barge so it can slide up and down and
|
||
thus be jammed directly into the seabed. But instead of a cutting blade
|
||
on its leading edge, it has a row of hardened-steel injector nozzles
|
||
that spurt highly pressurized water, piped in from a huge pump buried in
|
||
the Elbe's engine room. These nozzles fluidize the seabed and thus make
|
||
it possible for the giant blade to penetrate it. Along the trailing edge
|
||
of the blade runs a channel for the cable so that as the blade works its
|
||
way forward, the cable is gently laid into the bottom of the slit. The
|
||
barge carries a set of extensions that can be bolted onto the top of the
|
||
injector so it can operate in water as deep as 40 meters, burying the
|
||
cable as deep as 9 meters beneath the seabed. This sufficed to lay the
|
||
cable out for a distance of 10 kilometers from Tong Fuk. Later, another
|
||
barge, the Chinann, will come to continue work out to 100 meters deep
|
||
and will bury both legs of the FLAG cable for another 60 kilometers out
|
||
to get them through a dangerous anchorage zone.
|
||
|
||
The Elbe has its own tugboat, the Ocean East, staffed with an Indonesian
|
||
crew. Relations between the two vessels have been a bit tense because
|
||
the Indonesians butchered and ate all of the Elbe's laying hens,
|
||
terminating the egg supply. But it all seemed to have been patched up
|
||
when we were there; no one was fretting about it except for the Elbe's
|
||
rooster. When the Elbe is more than half a kilometer from shore, Ocean
|
||
East pulls her along by means of a cable. The tug's movements are
|
||
controlled from the Elbe's bridge over a radio link. Closer to shore,
|
||
the Elbe drops an anchor and then pulls itself along by winching the
|
||
line in. She can get more power by using the Harbormaster thruster units
|
||
mounted on each of her ends. But the main purpose of these thrusters is
|
||
to provide side propulsion so the barge's movements can be finely
|
||
controlled.
|
||
|
||
The nerve center of the Elbe is a raised, air-conditioned bridge jammed
|
||
with the electronic paraphernalia characteristic of modern ships, such
|
||
as a satellite phone, a fax machine, a plotter, and a Navtex machine to
|
||
receive meteorological updates. Probably the most important equipment is
|
||
the differential GPS system that tells the barge's operators exactly
|
||
where they are with respect to the all-important Route Position List: a
|
||
series of points provided by the surveyors. Their job is to connect
|
||
these dots with cable. Elbe's bridge normally sports four different
|
||
computers all concerned with navigation and station-keeping functions.
|
||
In addition to this complement, during the Tong Fuk cable lay, Dave
|
||
Handley was up here with his laptop, taking down data important to FLAG,
|
||
while the representatives from AT\&T and Cable & Wireless were also
|
||
present with their laptops compiling their own data.
|
||
|
||
Hey, wait a minute, the hacker tourist says to himself, I thought AT\&T
|
||
was the enemy. What's an AT\&T guy doing on the bridge of the Elbe,
|
||
side-by-side with Dave Handley?
|
||
|
||
The answer is that the telecom business is an unfathomably complicated
|
||
snarl of relationships. Not only did AT\&T (along with KDD) end up with
|
||
the contract to supply FLAG's cable, it also ended up landing a great
|
||
deal of the installation work. Not that many companies have what it
|
||
takes to manage an installation of FLAG's magnitude. AT\&T is one of
|
||
them and Nynex isn't. So it frequently happens at FLAG job sites that
|
||
AT\&T will be serving as the contractor, making the local contacts and
|
||
organizing the work, while FLAG's presence will be limited to one or two
|
||
reps whose allegiance is to the investors and whose job it is to make
|
||
sure it's all done the FLAG way, as opposed to the AT\&T way. As with
|
||
any other construction project from a doghouse on upward, countless
|
||
decisions must be made on the site, and here they need to be made the
|
||
way a group of private investors would make them - not the way a club
|
||
would.
|
||
|
||
If FLAG's investors spent any time at all looking into the history of
|
||
the cable-laying business, this topic must have given them a few
|
||
sleepless nights. The early years of the industry were filled with
|
||
decision making that can most charitably be described as colorful. In
|
||
those days, there were no experienced old hands. They just made
|
||
everything up as they went along, and as often as not, they got it
|
||
wrong.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ Thomson and Whitehouse\_\_
|
||
|
||
As of 1861, some 17,500 kilometers of submarine cable had been laid in
|
||
various places around the world, of which only about 5,000 kilometers
|
||
worked. The remaining 12,500 kilometers represented a loss to their
|
||
investors, and most of these lost investments were long cables such as
|
||
the ones between Britain and the United States and Britain and India
|
||
(3,500 and 5,600 kilometers, respectively). Understanding why long
|
||
cables failed was not a trivial problem; it defeated eminent scientists
|
||
like Rankine and Siemens and was solved, in the end, only by William
|
||
Thomson.
|
||
|
||
In prospect, it probably looked like it was going to be easy. Insulated
|
||
telegraph wires strung from pole to pole worked just as one might
|
||
expect, and so, assuming that watertight insulation could be found,
|
||
similar wires laid under the ocean should work just as well. The
|
||
insulation was soon found in the form of gutta-percha. Very long
|
||
gutta-percha-insulated wires were built. They worked fine when laid out
|
||
on the factory floor and tested. But when immersed in water they worked
|
||
poorly, if at all.
|
||
|
||
The problem was that water, unlike air, is an electrical conductor,
|
||
which is to say that charged particles are free to move around in it.
|
||
When a pulse of electrons moves down an immersed cable, it repels
|
||
electrons in the surrounding seawater, creating a positively charged
|
||
pulse in the water outside. These two charged regions interact with each
|
||
other in such a way as to smear out the original pulse moving down the
|
||
wire. The operator at the receiving end sees only a slow upward trend in
|
||
electrical charge, instead of a crisp jump. If the sending operator
|
||
transmitted the different pulses - the dots and dashes - too close
|
||
together, they'd blur as they moved down the wire.
|
||
|
||
Unfortunately, that's not the only thing happening in that wire. Long
|
||
cables act as antennae, picking up all kinds of stray currents as the
|
||
rotation of the Earth, and its revolution around the sun, sweep them
|
||
across magnetic fields of terrestrial and celestial origin. At the
|
||
Museum of Submarine Telegraphy in Porthcurno, Cornwall (which we'll
|
||
visit later), is a graph of the so-called Earth current measured in a
|
||
cable that ran from there to Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, decades ago.
|
||
Over a period of some 72 hours, the graph showed a variation in the
|
||
range of 100 volts. Unfortunately, the amplitude of the telegraph signal
|
||
was only 70 volts. So the weak, smeared-out pulses making their way down
|
||
the cable would have been almost impossible to hear above the music of
|
||
the spheres.
|
||
|
||
Finally, leakage in the cable's primitive insulation was inevitable. All
|
||
of these influences, added together, meant that early telegraphers could
|
||
send anything they wanted into the big wire, but the only thing that
|
||
showed up at the other end was noise.
|
||
|
||
These problems were known, but poorly understood, in the mid-1850s when
|
||
the first transatlantic cable was being planned. They had proved
|
||
troublesome but manageable in the early cables that bridged short gaps,
|
||
such as between England and Ireland. No one knew, yet, what would happen
|
||
in a much longer cable system. The best anyone could do, short of
|
||
building one, was to make predictions.
|
||
|
||
The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life
|
||
characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right
|
||
in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists, Burton to
|
||
explorers, Robert E. Lee to generals, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to
|
||
assholes. He achieved a level of pure accomplishment in this field that
|
||
the Alfonse D'Amatos of our time can only dream of. The only
|
||
19th-century figure who even comes close to him in this department is
|
||
Custer. In any case, Dr. Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse fancied
|
||
himself something of an expert on electricity. His rival was William
|
||
Thomson, 10 years younger, a professor of natural philosophy at Glasgow
|
||
University who was infatuated with Fourier analysis, a new and extremely
|
||
powerful tool that happened to be perfectly suited to the problem of how
|
||
to send electrical pulses down long submarine cables.
|
||
|
||
Wildman Whitehouse predicted that sending bits down long undersea cables
|
||
was going to be easy (the degradation of the signal would be
|
||
proportional to the length of the cable) and William Thomson predicted
|
||
that it was going to be hard (proportional to the length of the cable
|
||
squared). Naturally, they both ended up working for the same company at
|
||
the same time.
|
||
|
||
Whitehouse was a medical doctor, hence working in the wrong field, and
|
||
probably trailed Thomson by a good 50 or 100 IQ points. But that didn't
|
||
stop Whitehouse. In 1856, he published a paper stating that Thomson's
|
||
theories concerning the proposed transatlantic cable were balderdash.
|
||
The two men got into a public argument, which became extremely important
|
||
in 1858 when the Atlantic Telegraph Company laid such a cable from
|
||
Ireland to Newfoundland: a copper core sheathed in gutta-percha and
|
||
wrapped in iron wires.
|
||
|
||
This cable was, to put it mildly, a bad idea, given the state of cable
|
||
science and technology at the time. The notion of copper as a conductor
|
||
for electricity, as opposed to a downspout material, was still
|
||
extraordinary, and it was impossible to obtain the metal in anything
|
||
like a pure form. The cable was slapped together so shoddily that in
|
||
some places the core could be seen poking out through its gutta-percha
|
||
insulation even before it was loaded onto the cable-laying ship. But
|
||
venture capitalists back then were a more rugged - not to say crazy -
|
||
breed, and there can be no better evidence than that they let Wildman
|
||
Whitehouse stay on as the Atlantic Telegraph Company's chief electrician
|
||
long after his deficiencies had become conspicuous.
|
||
|
||
The physical process of building and laying the cable makes for a wild
|
||
tale in and of itself. But to do it justice, I would have to double the
|
||
length of this already herniated article. Let's just say that after lots
|
||
of excitement, they put a cable in place between Ireland and
|
||
Newfoundland. But for all of the reasons mentioned earlier, it hardly
|
||
worked at all. Queen Victoria managed to send President Buchanan a
|
||
celebratory message, but it took a whole day to send it. On a good day,
|
||
the cable could carry something like one word per minute. This fact was
|
||
generally hushed up, but the important people knew about it - so the
|
||
pressure was on Wildman Whitehouse, whose theories were blatantly
|
||
contradicted by the facts.
|
||
|
||
Whitehouse convinced himself that the solution to their troubles was
|
||
brute force - send the message at extremely high voltages. To that end,
|
||
he invented and patented a set of 5-foot-long induction coils capable of
|
||
ramming 2,000 volts into the cable. When he hooked them up to the
|
||
Ireland end of the system, he soon managed to blast a hole through the
|
||
gutta-percha somewhere between there and Newfoundland, turning the
|
||
entire system into useless junk.
|
||
|
||
Long before this, William Thomson had figured out, by dint of Fourier
|
||
analysis, that incoming bits could be detected much faster by a more
|
||
sensitive instrument. The problem was that instruments in those days had
|
||
to work by physically moving things around, for example, by closing an
|
||
electromagnetic relay that would sound a buzzer. Moving things around
|
||
requires power, and the bits on a working transatlantic cable embodied
|
||
very little power. It was difficult to make a physical object small
|
||
enough to be susceptible to such ghostly traces of current.
|
||
|
||
Thomson's solution (actually, the first of several solutions) was the
|
||
mirror galvanometer, which incorporated a tiny fleck of reflective
|
||
material that would twist back and forth in the magnetic field created
|
||
by the current in the wire. A beam of light reflecting from the fleck
|
||
would swing back and forth like a searchlight, making a dim spot on a
|
||
strip of white paper. An observer with good eyesight sitting in a
|
||
darkened room could tell which way the current was flowing by watching
|
||
which way the spot moved. Current flowing in one direction signified a
|
||
Morse code dot, in the other a dash. In fact, the information that had
|
||
been transmitted down the cable in the brief few weeks before Wildman
|
||
Whitehouse burned it to a crisp had been detected using Thomson's mirror
|
||
galvanometer - though Whitehouse denied it.
|
||
|
||
After the literal burnout of the first transatlantic cable, Wildman
|
||
Whitehouse and Professor Thomson were grilled by a committee of eminent
|
||
Victorians who were seriously pissed off at Whitehouse and enthralled
|
||
with Thomson, even before they heard any testimony - and they heard a
|
||
lot of testimony.
|
||
Whitehouse disappeared into ignominy. Thomson ended up being knighted
|
||
and later elevated to a baron by Queen Victoria. He became Lord Kelvin
|
||
and eventually got an important unit of measurement, an even more
|
||
important law of physics, and a refrigerator named after him.
|
||
|
||
Eight years after Whitehouse fried the first, a second transatlantic
|
||
cable was built to Lord Kelvin's specifications with his patented mirror
|
||
galvanometers at either end of it. He bought a 126-ton schooner yacht
|
||
with the stupendous amount of money he made from his numerous
|
||
cable-related patents, turned the ship into a floating luxury palace and
|
||
laboratory for the invention of even more fantastically lucrative
|
||
patents. He then spent the rest of his life tooling around the British
|
||
Isles, Bay of Biscay, and western Mediterranean, frequently hosting
|
||
Dukes and continental savants who all commented on the nerd-lord's
|
||
tendency to stop in the middle of polite conversation to scrawl out long
|
||
skeins of equations on whatever piece of paper happened to be handy.
|
||
|
||
Kelvin went on to design and patent other devices for extracting bits
|
||
from the ends of cables, and other engineers went to work on the
|
||
problem, too. By the 1920s, the chore of translating electrical pulses
|
||
into letters had been largely automated. Now, of course, humans are
|
||
completely out of the loop.
|
||
|
||
The number of people working in cable landing stations is probably about
|
||
the same as it was in Kelvin's day. But now they are merely caretakers
|
||
for machines that process bits about as fast as a billion telegraphers
|
||
working in parallel.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ The Hacker Tourist travels to the Land of the Rising Sun.\_\_
|
||
|
||
Technological wonders of modern cable stations. Why Ugandans could not
|
||
place telephone calls to Seattle. Trawlers, tickler chains, teredo
|
||
worms, and other hazards to undersea cables. The immense financial
|
||
stakes involved - why cable owners do not care for the company of
|
||
fishermen,and vice versa.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ 35° 17.690' N, 139° 46.328' EKDD Cable Landing Station, Ninomiya,
|
||
Japan\_\_
|
||
|
||
Whether they are in Thailand, Egypt, or Japan, modern cable landing
|
||
stations have much in common with each other. Shortly after touching
|
||
down in Tokyo, we were standing in KDD's landing station in Ninomiya,
|
||
Japan. I'll describe it to you.
|
||
|
||
A surprising amount of space in the station is devoted to electrical
|
||
gear. The station must not lose power, so there are two separate,
|
||
redundant emergency generators. There is also likely to be a transformer
|
||
to supply power to the cable system. We think of optical fibers as
|
||
delicate strands consuming negligible power, but all of those repeaters,
|
||
spaced every few dozen kilometers across an ocean, end up consuming a
|
||
lot of juice: for a big transoceanic cable, one or two amperes at 7,000
|
||
or so volts, for a total of something like 10,000 watts. The equipment
|
||
handling that power makes a hum you can feel in your bones, kicking the
|
||
power out not along wires but solid copper bars suspended from the
|
||
ceiling, with occasional sections of massive braided metal ribbon so
|
||
they won't snap in an earthquake.
|
||
|
||
The emergency generators are hooked into a battery farm that fills a
|
||
room. The batteries are constantly trickle-charged and exist simply to
|
||
provide power during an emergency - after the regular power goes out but
|
||
before the generators kick in. Most of the equipment in the cable
|
||
station is computer gear that demands a stable temperature, so there are
|
||
two separate, redundant air-conditioning plants feeding into a big
|
||
system of ventilation ducts. The equipment must not get dirty or get
|
||
fried by sparks from the fingers of hacker tourists, so you leave your
|
||
shoes by the door and slip into plastic antistatic flip-flops. The
|
||
equipment must not get smashed up in earthquakes, so the building is
|
||
built like a brick shithouse.
|
||
|
||
The station is no more than a few hundred meters from a beach. Sandy
|
||
beaches in out-of-the-way areas are preferred. The cable comes in under
|
||
the sand until it hits a beach manhole, where it continues through
|
||
underground ducts until it comes up out of the floor of the cable
|
||
station into a small, well-secured room. The cable is attached to
|
||
something big and strong, such as a massive steel grid bolted into the
|
||
wall. Early cable technicians were sometimes startled to see their
|
||
cables suddenly jerk loose from their moorings inside the station -
|
||
yanking the guts out of expensive pieces of equipment - and disappear in
|
||
the direction of the ocean, where a passing ship had snagged them.
|
||
|
||
From holes in the floor, the cables pass up into boxes where all the
|
||
armor and insulation are stripped away from them and where the tubular
|
||
power lead surrounding the core is connected to the electrical service
|
||
(7,500 volts in the case of FLAG) that powers the repeaters out in the
|
||
middle of the ocean. Its innards then con-tinue, typically in some kind
|
||
of overhead wiring plenum (a miniature catwalk suspended from the
|
||
ceiling) into the Big Room Full of Expensive Stuff.
|
||
|
||
The Big Room Full of Expensive Stuff is at least 25 meters on a side and
|
||
commonly has a floor made of removable, perforated plates covering
|
||
plenums through which wires can be routed, an overhead grid of open
|
||
plenums from which wires descend like jungle vines, or both. Most of the
|
||
room is occupied by equipment racks arranged in parallel rows (think of
|
||
the stacks at a big library). The racks are tall, well over most
|
||
people's heads, and their insides are concealed and protected by face
|
||
plates bearing corporate logos: AT\&T, Alcatel, Fujitsu. In the case of
|
||
an optical cable like FLAG, they contain the Light Terminal: the gear
|
||
that converts the 1,558-nanometer signal lasers coming down the fiber
|
||
strands into digits within an electrical circuit, and vice versa. The
|
||
Light Terminal is contained within a couple of racks that, taken
|
||
together, are about the size of a refrigerator.
|
||
|
||
All the other racks of gear filling the room cope with the unfathomable
|
||
hassles associated with trying to funnel that many bits into and out of
|
||
the fiber. In the end, that gear is, of course, connected to the local
|
||
telecommunications system in some way. Hence one commonly sees microwave
|
||
relay towers on top of these buildings and lots of manholes in the
|
||
streets around them. One does not, however, see a lot of employees,
|
||
because for the most part this equipment runs itself. Every single
|
||
circuit board in every slot of every level of every rack in the whole
|
||
place has a pair of copper wires coming out of it to send an alarm
|
||
signal in the event that the board fails. Like tiny rivulets joining
|
||
together into a mighty river, these come together into bundles as thick
|
||
as your leg that snake beneath the floor plates to an alarm center where
|
||
they are patched into beautiful rounded clear plastic cases enclosing
|
||
grids of interconnect pins. From here they are tied into communications
|
||
lines that run all the way to Tokyo so that everything on the premises
|
||
can be monitored remotely during nights and weekends. Ninomiya is
|
||
staffed with nine employees and Miura, FLAG's other Japanese landing
|
||
point, only one.
|
||
|
||
With one notable exception, the hacker tourist sees no particular
|
||
evidence that any of this has the slightest thing to do with
|
||
communications. It might as well be the computer room at a big
|
||
university or insurance company. The one exception is a telephone
|
||
handset hanging on a hook on one of the equipment racks. The handset is
|
||
there, but there's no keypad. Above it is a sign bearing the name of a
|
||
city far, far away. "Ha, ha\!" I said, the first time I saw one of
|
||
these, "that's for talking to the guy in California, right?" To my
|
||
embarrassment, my tour guides nodded yes. Each cable system has
|
||
something called the order wire, which enables the technicians at
|
||
opposite ends of the cable to talk to each other. At a major landing
|
||
station you will see several order wires labeled with the names of
|
||
exotic-sounding cities on the opposite side of the nearest large body of
|
||
water.
|
||
|
||
That is the bare minimum that you will see at any cable station. At
|
||
Ninomiya you see a bit more, and therein lies something of a tale.
|
||
|
||
Ninomiya is by far the oldest of KDD's seven cable landing stations,
|
||
having been built in 1964 to land TPC-1, which connected Japan to Guam
|
||
and hence to the United States. Unlike many of FLAG's other landing
|
||
sites, which are still torn up by backhoe tracks, it is surrounded by
|
||
perfectly maintained gardens marred only by towering gray steel poles
|
||
with big red lights on them aimed out toward the sea in an attempt to
|
||
dissuade mariners from dropping anchor anywhere nearby. Ninomiya served
|
||
as a training ground for Japanese cable talent. Some of the people who
|
||
learned the trade there are among the top executives in KDD's hierarchy
|
||
today.
|
||
|
||
During the 1980s, when Americans started to get freaked out about Japan
|
||
again, we heard a great deal about Japanese corporations' patient,
|
||
long-term approach to R\&D and how vastly superior it was to American
|
||
companies' stupid, short-term approach. Since American news media are at
|
||
least as stupid and short-term as the big corporations they like to
|
||
bitch about, we have heard very little follow-up to such stories in
|
||
recent years, which is kind of disappointing because I was sort of
|
||
wondering how it was all going to turn out. But now the formerly
|
||
long-term is about to come due.
|
||
|
||
By the beginning of the 1980s, the generation of cable-savvy KDD men who
|
||
had cut their teeth at Ninomiya had reached the level where they could
|
||
begin diverting corporate resources into R\&D programs. Tohru Ohta, who
|
||
today is the executive vice president of KDD, managed to pry some money
|
||
loose and get it into the hands of a protégé, Dr. Yasuhiko Niiro, who
|
||
launched one of those vaunted far-sighted Japanese R\&D programs at
|
||
Ninomiya. The terminal building for TPC-1, which had been the center of
|
||
the Japanese international telecommunications network in 1964, was
|
||
relegated to a laboratory for Niiro. The goal was to make KDD a player
|
||
in the optical-fiber submarine cable manufacturing business.
|
||
|
||
Such a move was not without controversy in the senior ranks of KDD, who
|
||
had devoted themselves to a very different corporate mission. In 1949,
|
||
when Japan was still being run by Douglas MacArthur and the country was
|
||
trying to dig out from the rubble of the war, Nippon Telephone &
|
||
Telegraph (NT\&T) split off its international department into a new
|
||
company called Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co., Ltd. (KDD), which means
|
||
International Telegraph & Telephone. KDD was much smaller and more
|
||
focused than NT\&T, and this was for a reason: Japan's international
|
||
communications system was a shambles, and nothing was more important to
|
||
the country's economic recovery than that it be rehabilitated as quickly
|
||
as possible. The hope was that KDD would be more nimble and agile than
|
||
its lumbering parent and get the job done faster.
|
||
|
||
This strategy seems to have more or less worked. Obviously, Japan has
|
||
succeeded in the world of international business. It is connected to the
|
||
United States by numerous transpacific cables; lines to the outside
|
||
world are plentiful. Of course, since KDD enjoyed monopoly status for a
|
||
long time, the fact that these lines are plentiful has never led to
|
||
their being cheap. Still, the system worked. Like much else that worked
|
||
in Japan's postwar economy, it succeeded, in those early years,
|
||
precisely insofar as it worked hand-in-glove with American companies and
|
||
institutions. AT\&T, in other words.
|
||
|
||
Unlike the United States or France or Great Britain, Japan was never
|
||
much of a player in the submarine cable business back in the prewar
|
||
days, and so Ohta's and Niiro's notion of going into head-to-head
|
||
competition against AT\&T, its postwar sugar daddy, might have seemed
|
||
audacious. KDD had customarily been so close to AT\&T that many Japanese
|
||
mocked it cruelly. AT\&T is the sumo champion, they said, and KDD is its
|
||
koshi-ginchaku, its belt-holding assistant. The word literally means
|
||
waist purse but seems to have rude connotations along the lines of
|
||
jockstrap carrier.
|
||
|
||
Against all of that, the only thing that Ohta and Niiro had to go on was
|
||
the fact that their idea was a really, really good one. Building cables
|
||
is just the kind of thing that Japanese industry is good at: a highly
|
||
advanced form of manufacturing that requires the very best quality
|
||
control. Cables and repeaters have to work for at least 25 years under
|
||
some really unpleasant conditions.
|
||
|
||
KDD Submarine Cable Systems (KDD-SCS) built its first optical fiber
|
||
submarine cable system, TPC-3, in 1989 and will soon have more than
|
||
100,000 kilometers of cable in service worldwide. It designs and holds
|
||
the patents on the terminal equipment that we saw at Ninomiya, though
|
||
the equipment itself is manufactured by electronics giants like Toshiba
|
||
and NEC. KDD-SCS is building some of the cable and repeaters that make
|
||
up FLAG, and AT\&T-SSI is building the rest. A problem has already
|
||
surfaced in the AT\&T repeaters - they switched to a different soldering
|
||
technique which turns out to be not such a good idea. Eleven of the
|
||
repeaters that AT\&T made for FLAG have this problem, and all of them
|
||
are lying on the bottom of oceans with bits running through them - for
|
||
now. FLAG and AT\&T are still studying this problem and trying to decide
|
||
how to resolve it. Still, everyone in the cable business knows what
|
||
happened - it has to be considered a major win for KDD-SCS.
|
||
|
||
So when KDD threw some of its resources into one of those famous
|
||
far-sighted long-range Japanese R\&D programs, it paid off beautifully.
|
||
In the field of submarine cable systems, the lowly assistant has taught
|
||
the sumo champion a lesson and sent him reeling back - not quite out of
|
||
the ring, but certainly enough to get his attention. How, you might ask,
|
||
is the rest of KDD doing?
|
||
|
||
The answer is that, like most other PTTs, it's showing its age. Even the
|
||
tactful Japanese are willing to admit that they have performed poorly in
|
||
the world of international telecommunications compared to other
|
||
countries. Non-Japanese will tell you the same thing more
|
||
enthusiastically.
|
||
|
||
The telco deregulation wars have begun in Japan as they have almost
|
||
everywhere else, and KDD now has competitors in the form of
|
||
International Digital Communications Inc. (IDC), which owns the Miura
|
||
station, the other FLAG landing spot. In order to succeed in this
|
||
competition, KDD needs to invest a lot of money, but the very smallness
|
||
that made it such a good idea in 1949 puts it at a disadvantage when
|
||
large amounts of capital are needed.
|
||
|
||
Just as Ninomiya is a generic cable landing, so KDD is something of a
|
||
generic PTT, facing many of the same troubles that others do. For
|
||
example: the Japanese telecommunications ministry continues to set rates
|
||
at an artificially high level. At first blush, this would seem to help
|
||
KDD by making it much more difficult for upstarts like IDC to compete
|
||
with them. But in fact it has opened the door to an unexpected form of
|
||
competition: callback.
|
||
|
||
Callback and Kallback are registered trademarks of Seattle-based
|
||
International Telcom Ltd. (ITL), but, like band-aid and kleenex, tend to
|
||
be used in a generic way by people overseas. The callback concept is
|
||
based on the fact that it's much cheaper to call Japan from the US than
|
||
it is to call the US from Japan. Subscribers to a callback service are
|
||
given a phone number in the US. When they want to make a call, they dial
|
||
that number, wait for it to ring once, and then hang up so they won't be
|
||
charged for the call. In the jargon of the callback world, this is the
|
||
trigger call. A system in the US then calls them back, giving them a
|
||
cheap international line, and once that is accomplished, it's an easy
|
||
matter to shunt the call elsewhere: to a number in the States or in any
|
||
other country in the world.
|
||
|
||
Any phone call made between two countries is subject to a so-called
|
||
settlement charge, which is assessed on a per-minute basis. The amount
|
||
of the settlement charged is fixed by an agreement between the two
|
||
countries' PTTs and generally provides a barometer of their relative
|
||
size and power. So, for example, when working out the deal with Denmark,
|
||
Pakistan might say, "Hey, Danes are rich, and we don't really care
|
||
whether they call us or not, and they have no particular leverage over
|
||
us - so POW\!" and insist on a high settlement charge - say $4 per
|
||
minute. But when negotiating against AT\&T, Pakistan might agree to a
|
||
lower settlement charge - say $1 per minute.
|
||
|
||
Settlement charges have long been a major source of foreign exchange for
|
||
developing countries' PTTs and hence for their governments and any
|
||
crooked officials who may be dipping into the money stream. In some
|
||
underdeveloped nations, they have been the major - verging on the only -
|
||
source of such income. But not for long.
|
||
|
||
Nowadays, a Dane who makes lot of international calls will subscribe to
|
||
a service such as ITL's Kallback. He makes a trigger call to Kallback's
|
||
computer in Seattle, which, since it is an incomplete call, costs him
|
||
nothing. The computer phones him back within a few seconds. He then
|
||
punches in the number he wants to call in Pakistan, and the computer in
|
||
Seattle places the call for him and makes the connection. Since
|
||
Pakistan's PTT has no way to know that the call originates in Denmark,
|
||
it assesses the lower AT\&T settlement charge. The total settlement
|
||
charge ends up being much less than what the Dane would have paid if
|
||
he'd dialed Pakistan directly. In other words, two calls from the US,
|
||
one to point A and one to point B, are cheaper than one direct call from
|
||
point A to point B.
|
||
|
||
KDD, like many other PTTs around the world, has tried to crack down on
|
||
callback services by compiling lists of the callback numbers and
|
||
blocking calls to those numbers. When I talked to Eric Doescher, ITL's
|
||
director of marketing, I expected him to be outraged about such attacks.
|
||
But it soon became evident that if he ever felt that way, he long ago
|
||
got over it and now views all such efforts with jaded amusement. "In
|
||
Uganda," he said, "the PTT blocked all calls to the 206 area code. So we
|
||
issued numbers from different area codes. In Saudi Arabia, they disabled
|
||
touch-tones upon connection so our users were unable to place calls when
|
||
the callback arrived - so we instituted a sophisticated voice
|
||
recognition system - customer service reps who listened to our customers
|
||
speaking the number and keyed it into the system." In Canada, a bizarre
|
||
situation developed in which calls from the Yukon and Northwest
|
||
Territories to the big southeastern cities like Ottawa and Toronto were
|
||
actually cheaper - by a factor of three - when routed through Seattle
|
||
than when dialed directly. In response to the flood of Kallback traffic,
|
||
Canada's Northern Telecom had human operators monitor phone calls,
|
||
listening for the distinctive pattern of a trigger call: one ring
|
||
followed by a hang-up. They then blocked calls to those numbers. So ITL
|
||
substituted a busy signal for the ringing sound. Northern Telecom,
|
||
unwilling to block calls to every phone in the US that was ever busy,
|
||
was checkmated.
|
||
|
||
In most countries, callback services inhabit a gray area. Saudi Arabia
|
||
and Kenya occasionally run ads reminding their people that callback is
|
||
illegal, but they don't try to enforce the law. China has better luck
|
||
with enforcement because of its system of informants, but it doesn't
|
||
bother Western businesspeople, who are the primary users. Singapore has
|
||
legalized them on the condition that they don't advertise. In Italy, the
|
||
market is so open that ITL is about to market a debit card that enables
|
||
people to use the service from any pay phone.
|
||
|
||
So settlement charges have backfired on the telcos of many countries.
|
||
Originally created to coddle these local monopolies, they've now become
|
||
a hazard to their existence.
|
||
|
||
KDD carries all the baggage of an old monopoly: it works in conjunction
|
||
with a notoriously gray and moribund government agency, it still has the
|
||
bad customer-service attitude that is typical of monopolies, and it has
|
||
the whole range of monopoly PR troubles too. Any competitive actions
|
||
that it takes tend to be construed as part of a sinister world
|
||
domination plot. So KDD has managed to get the worst of both worlds: it
|
||
is viewed both as a big sinister monopoly and as a cringing sidekick to
|
||
the even bigger and more sinister AT\&T.
|
||
|
||
Michio Kuroda is a KDD executive who negotiates deals relating to
|
||
submarine cables. He tells of a friend of his, a KDD employee who went
|
||
to the United States two decades ago to study at a university and went
|
||
around proudly announcing to his new American acquaintances that he
|
||
worked for a monopoly. Finally, some kind soul took him aside and gently
|
||
broke the news to him that, in America, monopoly was an ugly word.
|
||
|
||
Now, 20 years later, Kuroda claims that KDD has come around; it agrees
|
||
now that monopoly is an ugly word. KDD's detractors will say that this
|
||
is self-serving, but it rings true to this reporter. It seems clear that
|
||
a decision has been made at the highest levels of KDD that it's time to
|
||
stop looking backward and start to compete. As KDD is demonstrating, fat
|
||
payrolls can be trimmed. Capital can be raised. Customer service can be
|
||
improved, prices cut, bad PR mended. The biggest challenge that KDD
|
||
faces now may stem from a mistake that it made several years ago: it
|
||
decided not to land FLAG.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ 35° 11.535' N, 139° 36.995' EIDC Cable Landing Station, Miura,
|
||
Japan\_\_
|
||
|
||
The Miura station of IDC, or International Digital Communications Inc.,
|
||
looks a good deal like KDD's Ninomiya station on the inside, except that
|
||
its equipment is made by Fujitsu instead of KDD-SCS. At first
|
||
approximation, you might think of IDC as being the MCI of Japan.
|
||
Originally it specialized in data transmission, but now that
|
||
deregulation has arrived it is also a long-distance carrier. This, by
|
||
the way, is a common pattern in Asian countries where deregulation is
|
||
looming: new companies will try to kick out a niche for themselves in
|
||
data or cellular markets and hold on by their toenails until the vast
|
||
long-distance market opens up to them. Anyone in Japan can dial an
|
||
international call over IDC's network by dialing the prefix 0061 instead
|
||
of 001 for KDD. The numerical prefixes of various competing
|
||
long-distance companies are slapped up all over Tokyo on signs and
|
||
across rear windows of taxicabs in a desperate attempt to get a tiny
|
||
edge in mindshare.
|
||
|
||
Miura's outer surroundings are quite different from Ninomiya's. Ninomiya
|
||
is on a bluff in the middle of a town, and the beach below it is a
|
||
narrow strip of sand chockablock with giant concrete tetrapods, looking
|
||
like vastly magnified skeletons of plankton and intended to keep waves
|
||
from washing up onto the busy coastal highway that runs between the
|
||
beach and the station. Miura, by contrast, is a resort area with a wide
|
||
beach lined with seasonal restaurants. When we were there we even saw a
|
||
few surfers, hunting for puny waves under a relentless rain, looking
|
||
miserable in black wetsuits. The beach gives way to intensively
|
||
cultivated farmland.
|
||
|
||
Miura is the Japan end of NPC, the Northern Pacific Cable, which links
|
||
it directly to Pacific City, Oregon, with 8,380 kilometers of
|
||
second-generation optical fiber (it carries three fiber pairs, each of
|
||
which handles 420 Mbps). Miura also lands APC, the Asia-Pacific Cable,
|
||
which links it to Hong Kong and Singapore, and by means of a short cable
|
||
under Tokyo Bay it is connected to KDD's Chikura station, which is a
|
||
major nexus for transpacific and East Asian cables.
|
||
|
||
When FLAG first approached KDD with its wild scheme to build a privately
|
||
financed cable from England to Japan, there were plenty of reasons for
|
||
KDD to turn it down. The US Commerce Department was pressuring KDD to
|
||
accept FLAG, but AT\&T was against it. KDD was now caught between two
|
||
sumo wrestlers trying to push it opposite ways. Also in the crowded ring
|
||
was Japan's telecommunications ministry, which maintained that plenty of
|
||
bandwidth already existed and that FLAG would somehow create a glut on
|
||
the market. Again, this attitude is probably difficult for the hacker
|
||
tourist or any other Net user to comprehend, but it seems to be
|
||
ubiquitous among telecrats.
|
||
|
||
Finally, KDD saw advantages in the old business model in which cables
|
||
are backed, and owned, by carriers - it likes the idea of owning a cable
|
||
and reaping profits from it rather than allowing a bunch of outside
|
||
investors to make all the money.
|
||
|
||
For whatever reasons, KDD declined FLAG's invitation, so FLAG made
|
||
overtures to IDC, which readily agreed to land the cable at its Miura
|
||
station, where it could be cross-connected with NPC.
|
||
|
||
A similar scenario played out in Korea, by the way, where Korea Telecom,
|
||
traditionally a loyal member of the AT\&T family, turned FLAG down at
|
||
first. FLAG approached a competitor named Dacom, and, faced with that
|
||
threat, Korea Telecom changed its mind and decided to break with AT\&T
|
||
and land FLAG after all. But in Japan, KDD, perhaps displaying more
|
||
loyalty than was good for it, held the line. Miura became FLAG's
|
||
Japanese landing station by default - a huge coup for IDC, which could
|
||
now route calls to virtually anywhere in the world directly from its
|
||
station.
|
||
|
||
All of this happened prior to a major FLAG meeting in Singapore in 1992,
|
||
which those familiar with the project regard as having been a turning
|
||
point. At this meeting it became clear that FLAG was a serious endeavor,
|
||
that it really was going to happen. Not long afterward, AT\&T decided to
|
||
adopt an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'' strategy toward FLAG, which
|
||
eventually led to it and KDD Submarine Cable Systems getting the
|
||
contract to build FLAG's cable and repeaters. (AT\&T-SSI is supplying 64
|
||
percent of the cable and 59 percent of the repeaters, and KDD-SCS is
|
||
supplying the rest.) This was a big piece of good news for KDD-SCS, the
|
||
competitive-minded manufacturer, but it put KDD the poky long-distance
|
||
company in the awkward, perhaps even absurd situation of supplying the
|
||
hardware for a project that it had originally opposed and that would end
|
||
up being a cash cow for its toughest competitor.
|
||
|
||
So KDD changed its mind and began trying to get in on FLAG. Since FLAG
|
||
was already coming ashore at a station owned by IDC, this meant creating
|
||
a second landing in Japan, at Ninomiya. In no other country would FLAG
|
||
have two landings controlled by two different companies. For arcane
|
||
contractual reasons, this meant that all of the other 50-odd carriers
|
||
involved in FLAG would have to give unanimous consent to the
|
||
arrangement, which meant in practice that IDC had veto power. At a
|
||
ceremony opening a new KDD-SCS factory on Ky<4B>ush<73>u, executives from KDD
|
||
and IDC met to discuss the idea. IDC agreed to let KDD in, in exchange
|
||
for what people on both sides agree were surprisingly reasonable
|
||
conditions.
|
||
|
||
At first blush it might seem as though IDC was guilty of valuing harmony
|
||
and cooperation over the preservation of shareholder value - a common
|
||
charge leveled against Japanese corporations by grasping and peevish
|
||
American investors. Perhaps there was some element of this, but the fact
|
||
is that IDC did have good reasons for wanting FLAG connected to KDD's
|
||
network. KDD's Ninomiya station is scheduled to be the landing site for
|
||
TPC-5, a megaproject of the same order of magnitude as FLAG: 25,000
|
||
kilometers of third-generation optical fiber cable swinging in a vast
|
||
loop around the Pacific, connecting Japan with the West Coast of the US.
|
||
With both FLAG and TPC-5 literally coming into the same room at
|
||
Ninomiya, it would be possible to build a cross-connect between the two,
|
||
effectively extending FLAG's reach across the Pacific. This would add a
|
||
great deal of value to FLAG and hence would be good for IDC.
|
||
|
||
In any case, the deal fell through because of a strong anti-FLAG faction
|
||
within KDD that could not tolerate the notion of giving any concessions
|
||
whatever to IDC. There it stalemated until FLAG managed to cut a deal
|
||
with China Telecom to run a full-bore 10.6 Gbps spur straight into
|
||
Shanghai. While China has other undersea cable connections, they are
|
||
tiny compared with FLAG, which is now set to be the first big cable, as
|
||
well as the first modern Internet connection, into China.
|
||
|
||
At this point it became obvious that KDD absolutely had to get in on the
|
||
FLAG action no matter what the cost, and so it returned to the
|
||
bargaining table - but this time, IDC, sensing that it had an
|
||
overpoweringly strong hand, wanted much tougher conditions. Eventually,
|
||
though, the deal was made, and now jumpsuited workers are preparing
|
||
rooms at both Ninomiya and Miura to receive the new equipment racks,
|
||
much like expectant parents wallpapering the nursery.= At Ninomiya, an
|
||
immense cross-connect will be built between FLAG and TPC-5, and Miura
|
||
will house a cross-connect between FLAG and the smaller NPC cable.
|
||
|
||
The two companies will end up on an equal footing as far as FLAG is
|
||
concerned, but the crucial strategic misstep has already been made by
|
||
KDD: by letting IDC be the first to land FLAG, it has given its rival a
|
||
chance to acquire a great deal of experience in the business. It is not
|
||
unlike the situation that now exists between AT\&T, which used to be the
|
||
only company big and experienced enough to put together a major
|
||
international cable, and Nynex, which has now managed to get its foot in
|
||
that particular door and is rapidly gaining the experience and contacts
|
||
needed to compete with AT\&T in the future.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ Hazards\_\_
|
||
|
||
Dr. Wildman Whitehouse and his 5-foot-long induction coils were the
|
||
first hazard to destroy a submarine cable but hardly the last. It
|
||
sometimes seems as though every force of nature, every flaw in the human
|
||
character, and every biological organism on the planet is engaged in a
|
||
competition to see which can sever the most cables. The Museum of
|
||
Submarine Telegraphy in Porthcurno, England, has a display of wrecked
|
||
cables bracketed to a slab of wood. Each is labeled with its cause of
|
||
failure, some of which sound dramatic, some cryptic, some both: trawler
|
||
maul, spewed core, intermittent disconnection, strained core, teredo
|
||
worms, crab's nest, perished core, fish bite, even "spliced by
|
||
Italians." The teredo worm is like a science fiction creature, a bivalve
|
||
with a rasp-edged shell that it uses like a buzz saw to cut through wood
|
||
- or through submarine cables. Cable companies learned the hard way,
|
||
early on, that it likes to eat gutta-percha, and subsequent cables
|
||
received a helical wrapping of copper tape to stop it.
|
||
|
||
A modern cable needn't be severed to stop working. More frequently, a
|
||
fault in the insulation will allow seawater to leak in and reach the
|
||
copper conductor that carries power to the repeaters. The optical fibers
|
||
are fine, but the repeater stops working because its power is leaking
|
||
into the ocean. The interaction of electricity, seawater, and other
|
||
chemical elements present in the cable can produce hydrogen gas that
|
||
forces its way down the cable and chemically attacks the fiber or
|
||
delicate components in the repeaters.
|
||
|
||
Cable failure can be caused by any number of errors in installation or
|
||
route selection. Currents, such as those found before the mouths of
|
||
rivers, are avoided. If the bottom is hard, currents will chafe the
|
||
cable against it - and currents and hard bottoms frequently go together
|
||
because currents tend to scour sediments away from the rock. If the
|
||
cable is laid with insufficient slack, it may become suspended between
|
||
two ridges, and as the suspended part rocks back and forth, the ridges
|
||
eventually wear through the insulation. Sand waves move across the
|
||
bottom of the ocean like dunes across the desert; these can surface a
|
||
cable, where it may be bruised by passing ships. Anchors are a perennial
|
||
problem that gets much worse during typhoons, because an anchor that has
|
||
dropped well away from a cable may be dragged across it as the ship is
|
||
pushed around by the wind.
|
||
|
||
In 1870, a new cable was laid between England and France, and Napoleon
|
||
III used it to send a congratulatory message to Queen Victoria. Hours
|
||
later, a French fisherman hauled the cable up into his boat, identified
|
||
it as either the tail of a sea monster or a new species of gold-bearing
|
||
seaweed, and cut off a chunk to take home. Thus was inaugurated an
|
||
almost incredibly hostile relationship between the cable industry and
|
||
fishermen. Almost anyone in the cable business will be glad, even eager,
|
||
to tell you that since 1870 the intelligence and civic responsibility of
|
||
fisherman have only degraded. Fishermen, for their part, tend to see
|
||
everyone in the cable business as hard-hearted bluebloods out to screw
|
||
the common man.
|
||
|
||
Most of the fishing-related damage is caused by trawlers, which tow big
|
||
sacklike nets behind them. Trawlers seem designed for the purpose of
|
||
damaging submarine cables. Various types of hardware are attached to the
|
||
nets. In some cases, these are otter boards, which act something like
|
||
rudders to push the net's mouth open. When bottom fish such as halibut
|
||
are the target, a massive bar is placed across the front of the net with
|
||
heavy tickler chains dangling from it; these flail against the bottom,
|
||
stirring up the fish so they will rise up into the maw of the net.
|
||
|
||
Mere impact can be enough to wreck a cable, if it puts a leak in the
|
||
insulation. Frequently, though, a net or anchor will snag a cable. If
|
||
the ship is small and the cable is big, the cable may survive the
|
||
encounter. There is a type of cable, used up until the advent of optical
|
||
fiber, called 21-quad, which consists of 21 four-bundle pairs of cable
|
||
and a coaxial line. It is 15 centimeters in diameter, and a single meter
|
||
of it weighs 46 kilograms. If a passing ship should happen to catch such
|
||
a cable with its anchor, it will follow a very simple procedure: abandon
|
||
it and go buy a new anchor.
|
||
|
||
But modern cables are much smaller and lighter - a mere 0.85 kg per
|
||
meter for the unarmored, deep-sea portions of the FLAG cable - and the
|
||
ships most apt to snag them, trawlers, are getting bigger and more
|
||
powerful. Now that fishermen have massacred most of the fish in
|
||
shallower water, they are moving out deeper. Formerly, cable was plowed
|
||
into the bottom in water shallower than 1,000 meters, which kept it away
|
||
from the trawlers. Because of recent changes in fishing practices, the
|
||
figure has been boosted to 2,000 meters. But this means that the old
|
||
cables are still vulnerable.
|
||
|
||
When a trawler snags a cable, it will pull it up off the seafloor. How
|
||
far it gets pulled depends on the weight of the cable, the amount of
|
||
slack, and the size and horsepower of the ship. Even if the cable is not
|
||
pulled all the way to the surface, it may get kinked - its minimum
|
||
bending radius may be violated. If the trawler does succeed in hauling
|
||
the cable all the way up out of the water, the only way out of the
|
||
situation, or at least the simplest, is to cut the cable. Dave Handley
|
||
once did a study of a cable that had been suddenly and mysteriously
|
||
severed. Hauling up the cut end, he discovered that someone had sliced
|
||
through it with a cutting torch.
|
||
|
||
There is also the obvious threat of sabotage by a hostile government,
|
||
but, surprisingly, this almost never happens. When cypherpunk Doug
|
||
Barnes was researching his Caribbean project, he spent some time looking
|
||
into this, because it was exactly the kind of threat he was worried
|
||
about in the case of a data haven. Somewhat to his own surprise and
|
||
relief, he concluded that it simply wasn't going to happen. "Cutting a
|
||
submarine cable," Barnes says, "is like starting a nuclear war. It's
|
||
easy to do, the results are devastating, and as soon as one country does
|
||
it, all of the others will retaliate.
|
||
|
||
"Bert Porter, a Cable & Wireless cable-laying veteran who is now a
|
||
freelancer, was beachmaster for the Tong Fuk lay. He was on a ship that
|
||
laid a cable from Hong Kong to Singapore during the late 1960s. Along
|
||
the way they passed south of Lan Tao Island, and so the view from Tong
|
||
Fuk Beach is a trip down memory lane for him. "The repeater spacing was
|
||
about 18 miles," he says, "and so the first repeater went into the water
|
||
right out there. Then, a few days later, the cable suddenly tested
|
||
broken." In other words, the shore station in Hong Kong had lost contact
|
||
with the equipment on board Porter's cable ship. In such cases it's easy
|
||
to figure out roughly where the break occurred - by measuring the
|
||
resistance in the cable's conductors - and they knew it had to be
|
||
somewhere in the vicinity of the first repeater. "So we backtracked,
|
||
pulling up cable, and when we got right out there," he waves his hand
|
||
out over the bay, "we discovered that the repeater had simply been
|
||
chopped out." He holds his hands up parallel, like twin blades.
|
||
"Apparently the Chinese were curious about our repeaters, so they
|
||
thought they'd come out and get one."
|
||
|
||
As the capacity of optical fibers climbs, so does the economic damage
|
||
caused when the cable is severed. FLAG makes its money by selling
|
||
capacity to long-distance carriers, who turn around and resell it to end
|
||
users at rates that are increasingly determined by what the market will
|
||
bear. If FLAG gets chopped, no calls get through. The carriers' phone
|
||
calls get routed to FLAG's competitors (other cables or satellites), and
|
||
FLAG loses the revenue represented by those calls until the cable is
|
||
repaired. The amount of revenue it loses is a function of how many calls
|
||
the cable is physically capable of carrying, how close to capacity the
|
||
cable is running, and what prices the market will bear for calls on the
|
||
broken cable segment. In other words, a break between Dubai and Bombay
|
||
might cost FLAG more in revenue loss than a break between Korea and
|
||
Japan if calls between Dubai and Bombay cost more.
|
||
|
||
The rule of thumb for calculating revenue loss works like this: for
|
||
every penny per minute that the long distance market will bear on a
|
||
particular route, the loss of revenue, should FLAG be severed on that
|
||
route, is about $3,000 a minute. So if calls on that route are a dime a
|
||
minute, the damage is $30,000 a minute, and if calls are a dollar a
|
||
minute, the damage is almost a third of a million dollars for every
|
||
minute the cable is down. Upcoming advances in fiber bandwidth may push
|
||
this figure, for some cables, past the million-dollar-a-minute mark.
|
||
|
||
Clearly, submarine cable repair is a good business to be in. Cable
|
||
repair ships are standing by in ports all over the world, on 24-hour
|
||
call, waiting for a break to happen somewhere in their neighborhood.
|
||
They are called agreement ships. Sometimes, when nothing else is going
|
||
on, they will go out and pull up old abandoned cables. The stated reason
|
||
for this is that the old cables present a hazard to other ships.
|
||
However, if you do so much as raise an eyebrow at this explanation, any
|
||
cable man will be happy to tell you the real reason: whenever a
|
||
fisherman snags his net on anything - a rock, a wreck, or even a figment
|
||
of his imagination - he will go out and sue whatever company happens to
|
||
have a cable in that general vicinity. The cable companies are waiting
|
||
eagerly for the day when a fisherman goes into court claiming to have
|
||
snagged his nets on a cable, only to be informed that the cable was
|
||
pulled up by an agreement ship years before.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ In which the Hacker Tourist delights in Cairo, the Mother of the
|
||
World. Alexandria, the former Hacker Headquarters of the planet.\_\_
|
||
|
||
The lighthouse, the libraries, and other haunts of ancient nerds and
|
||
geeks. Profound significanceof intersections. Travels on the Desert
|
||
Road. Libya's contact with the outside world rudely severed - then
|
||
restored\! Engineer Musalamand his planetary information nexus. The
|
||
vitally important concept of Slack
|
||
|
||
\_\_ 31° 12.841' N, 29° 53.169' ESite of the Pharos lighthouse,
|
||
Alexandria, Egypt\_\_
|
||
|
||
Having stood on the beach of Miura watching those miserable-but-plucky
|
||
Japanese surfers, the hacker tourist had reached FLAG's easternmost
|
||
extreme, and there was nothing to do except turn around and head west.
|
||
Next stop: Egypt.
|
||
|
||
No visit to Egypt is complete without a stop in Cairo, but that city,
|
||
the pinnacle of every normal tourist's traveling career, is strangely
|
||
empty from a hacker tourist point of view. Its prime attraction, of
|
||
course, is the pyramids. We visited them at five in the morning during a
|
||
long and ultimately futile wait for the Egyptian military to give us
|
||
permission to rendezvous with FLAG's cable-laying ship in the Gulf of
|
||
Suez. To the hacker, the most interesting thing about the Pyramids is
|
||
their business plan, which is the simplest and most effective ever
|
||
devised:
|
||
|
||
(1) Put a rock on top of another rock.
|
||
(2) Repeat (1) until gawkers arrive.
|
||
(3) Separate them from their valuables by all conceivable means.
|
||
|
||
By contrast, normal tourist guidebooks have nothing good to say about
|
||
Alexandria; it's as if the writers got so tired of marveling at Cairo
|
||
and Upper Egypt that they had to vent their spleen somewhere. Though a
|
||
town was here in ancient times, Alexandria per se was founded in 332 BC
|
||
by Alexander the Great, which makes it a brand-new city by Egyptian
|
||
standards. There is almost no really old stuff in Alexandria at all, but
|
||
the mere memory of the landmarks that were here in its heyday suffice to
|
||
make it much more important than Cairo from the weirdly distorted
|
||
viewpoint of the hacker tourist. These landmarks are, or were, the
|
||
lighthouse and the libraries.
|
||
|
||
The lighthouse was built on the nearby island of Pharos. Neither the
|
||
building nor even the island exists any more. Pharos was eventually
|
||
joined to the mainland by a causeway, which fattened out into a
|
||
peninsula and became a minuscule bump on the scalp of Africa. The
|
||
lighthouse was an immense structure, at some 120 meters the tallest
|
||
building in the world for many centuries, and contained as many as 300
|
||
rooms. Somewhere in its upper stories a fire burned all night long, and
|
||
its light was reflected out across the Mediterranean by some kind of
|
||
rotating mirror or prism. This was a fine bit of ancient hacking in and
|
||
of itself, but according to legend, the optics also had magnifying
|
||
properties, so that observers peering through it during the daytime
|
||
could see ships too distant to be perceived by the naked eye.
|
||
|
||
According to legend, this feature made Alexandria immune to naval
|
||
assault as long as the lighthouse remained standing. According to
|
||
another yarn, a Byzantine emperor spread a rumor that the treasure of
|
||
Alexander the Great had been hidden within the lighthouse's foundation,
|
||
and the unbelievably fatuous local caliph tore up the works looking for
|
||
it, putting Pharos out of commission and leading to a military defeat by
|
||
the Byzantine Empire.
|
||
|
||
Some combination or other of gullible caliphs, poor maintenance, and
|
||
earthquakes eventually did fell the lighthouse. Evidently it toppled
|
||
right into the Mediterranean. The bottom of the sea directly before its
|
||
foundations is still littered with priceless artifacts, which are being
|
||
catalogued and hauled out by French archaeologists using differential
|
||
GPS to plot their findings. They work in the shadow of a nondescript
|
||
fortress built on the site by a later sultan, Qait Bey, who
|
||
pragmatically used a few chunks of lighthouse granite to beef up the
|
||
walls - just another splinter under the fingernails of the historical
|
||
preservation crowd.
|
||
|
||
You can go to the fortress of Qait Bey now and stare out over the ocean
|
||
and get much the same view that the builders of the lighthouse enjoyed.
|
||
They must have been able to see all kinds of weirdness coming over the
|
||
horizon from Europe and western Asia. The Mediterranean may look small
|
||
on a world map, but from Pharos its horizon seems just as infinite as
|
||
the Pacific seen from Miura. Back then, knowing how much of the human
|
||
world was around the Mediterranean, the horizon must have seemed that
|
||
much more vast, threatening, and exciting to the Alexandrians.
|
||
|
||
Building the lighthouse with its magic lens was a way of enhancing the
|
||
city's natural capability for looking to the north, which made it into a
|
||
world capital for many centuries. It's when a society plunders its
|
||
ability to look over the horizon and into the future in order to get
|
||
short-term gain - sometimes illusory gain - that it begins a long slide
|
||
nearly impossible to reverse.
|
||
|
||
The collapse of the lighthouse must have been astonishing, like watching
|
||
the World Trade Center fall over. But it took only a few seconds, and if
|
||
you were looking the other way when it happened, you might have missed
|
||
it entirely - you'd see nothing but blue breakers rolling in from the
|
||
Mediterranean, hiding a field of ruins, quickly forgotten.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ 31° 11.738' N, 29° 54.108' EIntersection of El Horreya and El Nabi
|
||
Daniel, Alexandria, Egypt\_\_
|
||
|
||
Alexandria is most famous for having been the site of the ancient
|
||
library. This was actually two or more different libraries. The first
|
||
one dates back to the city's early Ptolemaic rulers, who were
|
||
Macedonians, not Egyptians. It was modeled after the Lyceum of
|
||
Aristotle, who, between other gigs, tutored Alexander the Great. Back in
|
||
the days when people moved to information, instead of vice versa, this
|
||
library attracted most of the most famous smart people in the world: the
|
||
ultimate hacker, Archimedes; the father of geometry, Euclid;
|
||
Eratosthenes, who was the first person to calculate the circumference of
|
||
the earth, by looking at the way the sun shone down wells at Alexandria
|
||
and Aswan. He also ran the library for a while and took the job
|
||
seriously enough that when he started to go blind in his old age, he
|
||
starved himself to death. In any event, this library was burned out by
|
||
the Romans when they were adding Egypt to their empire. Or maybe it
|
||
wasn't. It's inherently difficult to get reliable information about an
|
||
event that consisted of the destruction of all recorded information.
|
||
|
||
The second library was called the Library of Cleopatra and was built
|
||
around a couple of hundred thousand manuscripts that were given to her
|
||
by Marc Antony in what was either a magnificent gesture of romantic love
|
||
or a shrewd political maneuver. Marc Antony suffered from what we would
|
||
today call "poor impulse control," so the former explanation is more
|
||
likely. This library was wiped out by Christians in AD 391. Depending on
|
||
which version of events you read, its life span may have overlapped with
|
||
that of the first library for a few years, a few decades, or not at all.
|
||
|
||
Whether or not the two libraries ever existed at the same time,
|
||
the fact remains that between about 300 BC and AD 400, Alexandria was by
|
||
far the world capital of high-quality information. It must have had much
|
||
in common with the MIT campus or Stanford in Palo Alto of more recent
|
||
times: lots of hairy smart guys converging from all over the world to
|
||
tinker with the lighthouse or to engage in pursuits that must have been
|
||
totally incomprehensible to the locals, such as staring down wells at
|
||
high noon and raving about the diameter of the earth.
|
||
|
||
The main reason that writers of tourist guidebooks are so cheesed off at
|
||
Alexandria is that no vestige of the first library remains - not even a
|
||
plaque stating "The Library of Alexandria was here." If you want to
|
||
visit the site, you have to do a bit of straightforward detective work.
|
||
Ancient Alexandria was laid out on a neat, regular grid pattern - just
|
||
the kind of thing you would expect of a place populated by people like
|
||
Euclid. The main east-west street was called the Canopic Way, and the
|
||
main north-south street, running from the waterfront toward the Sahara
|
||
Desert, was called the Street of the Soma. The library is thought to
|
||
have stood just south of their intersection.
|
||
|
||
Though no buildings of that era remain, the streets still do, and so
|
||
does their intersection. Currently, the Canopic Way is called El Horreya
|
||
Avenue, and the Soma is called El Nabi Daniel Street, though if you
|
||
don't hurry, they may be called something else when you arrive.
|
||
|
||
We stayed at the Cecil Hotel, where Nabi Daniel hits the waterfront. The
|
||
Cecil is one of those British imperial-era hotels fraught with romance
|
||
and history, sort of like the entire J. Peterman catalog rolled into one
|
||
building. British Intelligence was headquartered there during the war,
|
||
and there the Battle of El Alamein was planned.
|
||
|
||
Living as they do, however, in a country choked with old stuff, the
|
||
Egyptians have adopted a philosophy toward architecture that is best
|
||
summed up by the phrase: "What have you done for me lately?'' From this
|
||
point of view, the Cecil is just another old building, and it's not even
|
||
particularly old. As if to emphasize this, the side of the hotel where
|
||
we stayed was covered with a rude scaffolding (sticks lashed together
|
||
with hemp) aswarm with workers armed with sledgehammers, crowbars,
|
||
chisels, and the like, who spent all day, every day, bellowing
|
||
cheerfully at each other (demolition workers are the jolliest men in
|
||
every country), bashing huge chunks of masonry off the top floor and
|
||
simply dropping them - occasionally crushing an air conditioner on some
|
||
guest's balcony. It was a useful reminder that Egyptians feel no great
|
||
compulsion to tailor their cities to the specifications of guidebook
|
||
writers.
|
||
|
||
This fact can be further driven home by walking south on Nabi Daniel and
|
||
looking for the site of the Library of Alexandria. It is now occupied by
|
||
office buildings probably not more than 100, nor less than 50, years
|
||
old. Their openings are covered with roll-up steel doors, and their
|
||
walls decorated with faded signs. One of them advertises courses in DOS,
|
||
Lotus, dBase, COBOL, and others. Not far away is a movie theater showing
|
||
Forbidden Arsenal: In the Line of Duty 6, starring Cynthia Khan.
|
||
|
||
The largest and nicest building in the area is used by an insurance
|
||
company and surrounded by an iron fence. The narrow sidewalk out front
|
||
is blocked by a few street vendors who have set up their wares in such a
|
||
way as to force pedestrians out into the street. One of them is selling
|
||
pictures of adorable kittens tangled up in yarn, and another is peddling
|
||
used books. This is the closest thing to a library that remains here, so
|
||
I spent a while examining his wares: a promising volume called Bit by
|
||
Bit turned out to be an English primer. There were quite a few medical
|
||
textbooks, as if a doctor had just passed away, and Agatha Christie and
|
||
Mickey Mouse books presumably left behind by tourists. The closest thing
|
||
I saw to a classic was a worn-out copy of Oliver Twist.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ 31° 10.916' N29° 53.784' EPompey's Pillar\_\_
|
||
|
||
The site of Cleopatra's library, precisely 1 mile away by my GPS, is
|
||
viewed with cautious approval by guidebook writers because it is an
|
||
actual ruin with a wall around it, a ticket booth, old stuff, and
|
||
guides. It is right next to an active Muslim cemetery, so it is
|
||
difficult to reach the place without excusing your way past crowds of
|
||
women in voluminous black garments, wailing and sobbing heartrendingly,
|
||
which all goes to make the Western tourist feel like even more of a
|
||
penis than usual.
|
||
|
||
The site used to be the city's acropolis. It is a rounded hill of
|
||
extremely modest altitude with a huge granite pillar on the top. To
|
||
quote Shelley's "Ozymandias": "Nothing beside remains." A few sphinxes
|
||
are scattered around the place, but they were obviously dragged in to
|
||
give tourists something to look at. Several brutally impoverished gray
|
||
concrete apartment buildings loom up on the other side of the wall,
|
||
festooned with washing, crammed with children who entertain themselves
|
||
by raining catcalls down upon the few tourists who straggle out this
|
||
far. The granite pillar honors the Roman emperor Diocletian, who was a
|
||
very bad emperor, a major Christian-killer, but who gave Alexandria a
|
||
big tax break. The citizenry, apparently just as dimwitted as modern day
|
||
Americans, decided that he was a great guy and erected this pillar.
|
||
Originally there was a statue of Diocletian himself on the top, riding a
|
||
horse, which is why the Egyptians call it, in Arabic, The man on
|
||
horseback. The statue is gone now, which makes this a completely
|
||
mystifying name. Westerners call it Pompey's Pillar because that's the
|
||
moniker the clueless Crusaders slapped on it; of course, it has
|
||
absolutely nothing to do with Pompey.
|
||
|
||
The hacker tourist does not bother with the pillar but rather with what
|
||
is underneath it: a network of artificial caves, carved into the
|
||
sandstone, resembling nothing so much as a D & D player's first dungeon.
|
||
Because it's a hill and this is Egypt, the caverns are nice and dry and
|
||
(with a little baksheesh in the right hands) can be well lit too -
|
||
electrical conduit has been run in and light fixtures bolted to the
|
||
ceiling. The walls of these caves have niches that are just the right
|
||
size and shape to contain piles of scrolls, so this is thought to be the
|
||
site of the Library of Cleopatra. This complex was called the Sarapeum,
|
||
or Temple of Sarapis, who was a conflation of Osiris and Apis admired by
|
||
the locals and loathed by monotheists, which explains why the whole
|
||
complex was sacked and burned by Christians in 391.
|
||
|
||
It is all rather discouraging, when you use your imagination (which you
|
||
must do constantly in Alexandria) and think of the brilliance that was
|
||
here for a while. As convenient as it is for information to come to us,
|
||
libraries do have a valuable side effect: they force all of the smart
|
||
people to come together in one place where they can interact with one
|
||
another. When the information goes up in flames, those people go their
|
||
separate ways. The synergy that joined them - that created the
|
||
lighthouse, for example - dies. The world loses something.
|
||
|
||
So the second library is some holes in a wall, and the first is an
|
||
intersection. Holes and intersections are both absences, empty places,
|
||
disappointing to tourists of both the regular and the hacker variety.
|
||
But one can argue that the intersection's continued presence is arguably
|
||
more interesting than some old pile that has been walled off and
|
||
embalmed by a historical society. How can an intersection remain in one
|
||
place for 2,500 years? Simply, both the roads that run through it must
|
||
remain open and active. The intersection will cease to exist if sand
|
||
drifts across it because it's never used, or if someone puts up a
|
||
building there. In Egypt, where yesterday's wonders of the world are
|
||
today's building materials, nothing is more obvious than that people
|
||
have been avidly putting up buildings everywhere they possibly can for
|
||
5,000 years, so it is remarkable that no such thing has happened here.
|
||
It means that every time some opportunist has gone out and tried to dig
|
||
up the street or to start putting up a wall, he has been flattened by
|
||
traffic, arrested by cops, chased away by outraged donkey-cart drivers,
|
||
or otherwise put out of action. The existence of this intersection is
|
||
proof that a certain pattern of human activity has endured in this exact
|
||
place for 2,500 years.
|
||
|
||
When the hacker tourist has tired of contemplating the profound
|
||
significance of intersections (which, frankly, doesn't take very long)
|
||
he must turn his attention to - you guessed it - cable routes. This
|
||
turns out to be a much richer vein.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ 30° 58.319' N, 29° 49.531' EAlexandria Tollbooth, the Desert Road,
|
||
Sahara Desert, Egypt\_\_
|
||
|
||
As we speed across the Saharan night, the topic of conversation turns to
|
||
Hong Kong. Our Egyptian driver, relaxed and content after stopping at a
|
||
roadside rest area for a hubbly-bubbly session (smoking sweetened
|
||
tobacco in a Middle Eastern bong), smacks the steering wheel gleefully.
|
||
"Ha, ha, ha\!" he roars. "Miserable Hong Kong people\!"
|
||
|
||
Alexandria and Cairo are joined by two separate, roughly parallel
|
||
highways called the Desert Road and the Agricultural Road. The latter
|
||
runs through cultivated parts of the Nile Delta. The Desert Road is a
|
||
rather new, four-lane highway with a tollbooth at each end - tollbooths
|
||
in the middle not being necessary, because if you get off in the middle
|
||
you will die. It is lined for its entire length with billboards
|
||
advertising tires, sunglasses, tires, tires, tires, bottled water,
|
||
sunglasses, tires, and tires.
|
||
|
||
Perhaps because it is supported by tolls, the Desert Highway is a
|
||
first-rate road all the way. This means not merely that the pavement is
|
||
good but also that it has a system of ducts and manholes buried under
|
||
its median strip, so that anyone wishing to run a cable from one end of
|
||
the highway to the other - tollbooth to tollbooth - need only obtain a
|
||
"permit" and ream out the ducts a little. Or at least that's what the
|
||
Egyptians say. The Lan Tao Island crowd, who are quite discriminating
|
||
when it comes to ducts and who share an abhorrence of all things
|
||
Egyptian, claim that cheap PVC pipe was used and that the whole system
|
||
is a tangled mess.
|
||
|
||
They would both agree, however, that beyond the tollbooths the duct
|
||
situation is worse. The Alexandria Tollbooth is some 37 kilometers
|
||
outside of the city center; you get there by driving along a free
|
||
highway that has no ducts at all.
|
||
|
||
This problem is being remedied by FLAG, which has struck a deal with
|
||
ARENTO (Arab Republic of Egypt National Telecommunications Organization
|
||
- the PTT) that is roughly analogous to the one it made with the
|
||
Communications Authority of Thailand. FLAG has no choice but to go
|
||
overland across Egypt, just as in Thailand. The reasons for doing so
|
||
here are entirely different, though.
|
||
|
||
By a freak of geography and global politics, Egypt possesses the same
|
||
sort of choke point on Europe-to-Asia telecommunications as the Suez
|
||
canal gives it in the shipping industry. Anyone who wants to run a cable
|
||
from Europe to East Asia has severely limited choices. You can go south
|
||
around Africa, but it's much too far. You can go overland across all of
|
||
Russia, as U S West has recently talked about doing, but if even a
|
||
170-kilometers terrestrial route across Thailand gets your customers
|
||
fumbling for their smelling salts, what will they say about one all the
|
||
way across Russia? You could attempt a shorter terrestrial route from
|
||
the Levant to the Indian Ocean, but given the countries it would have to
|
||
pass through (Lebanon and Iraq, to name two), it would have about as
|
||
much chance of survival as a strand of gossamer stretched across a
|
||
kick-boxing ring. And you can't lay a cable down the Suez Canal, partly
|
||
because it would catch hell from anchors and dredgers, and partly
|
||
because cable-laying ships move very slowly and would create an enormous
|
||
traffic jam.
|
||
|
||
The only solution that is even remotely acceptable is to land the cable
|
||
on Egypt's Mediterranean coast (which in practice means either
|
||
Alexandria or Port Said) and then go overland to Suez, where the canal
|
||
joins the Gulf of Suez, which in turn joins the Red Sea. The Red Sea is
|
||
so shallow and so heavily trafficked, by the way, that all cables
|
||
running through it must be plowed into the seafloor, which is a hassle,
|
||
but obviously preferable to running a terrestrial route through the
|
||
likes of Sudan and Somalia, which border it.
|
||
|
||
In keeping with its practice of running two parallel routes on
|
||
terrestrial sections, FLAG is landing at both Alexandria and Port Said.
|
||
From these cities the cables converge on Suez. Alexandria is far more
|
||
important than Port Said as a cable nexus for the simple reason that it
|
||
is at the westernmost extreme of the Nile Delta, so you can reach it
|
||
from Europe without having to contend with the Nile. European cables
|
||
running to Port Said, by contrast, must pass across the mouths of the
|
||
Nile, where they are subjected to currents.
|
||
|
||
Engineer Mustafa Musalam, general manager of transmission for ARENTO's
|
||
Alexandria office, is a stocky, affable, silver-haired gent. Egypt is
|
||
one of those places where Engineer is used as a title, like Doctor or
|
||
Professor, and Engineer Musalam bears the title well. In his personality
|
||
and bearing he has at least as much in common with other highly
|
||
competent engineers around the world as he does with other Egyptians. In
|
||
defiance of ARENTO rules, he drives himself around in his own vehicle, a
|
||
tiny, beat-up, but perfectly functional subcompact. An engineer of his
|
||
stature is supposed to be chauffeured around in a company car. Most
|
||
Egyptian service-industry professionals are masters at laying
|
||
passive-aggressive head trips on their employers. Half the time, when
|
||
you compensate them, they make it clear that you have embarrassed them,
|
||
and yourself, by grossly overdoing it - you have just gotten it totally
|
||
wrong, really pissed down your leg, and placed them in a terribly
|
||
awkward situation. The other half of the time, you have insulted them by
|
||
being miserly. You never get it right. But Engineer Musalam, a logical
|
||
and practical-minded sort, cannot abide the idea of a driver spending
|
||
his entire day, every day, sitting in a car waiting for the boss to go
|
||
somewhere. So he eventually threw up his hands and unleashed his driver
|
||
on the job market.
|
||
|
||
Charitably, Engineer Musalam takes the view that the completion of the
|
||
Asw<EFBFBD>an High Dam tamed the Nile's current to the point where no one need
|
||
worry about running cables to Port Said anymore. FLAG's surveyors
|
||
obviously agree with him, because they chose Port Said as one of their
|
||
landing points. On the other hand, FLAG's archenemy, SEA-ME-WE 3, will
|
||
land only at Alexandria, because France Telecom's engineers refuse to
|
||
lay cable across the Nile. SEA-ME-WE 3's redundant routes will run,
|
||
instead, along the Desert Road and the Agricultural Road. Bandwidth
|
||
buyers trying to choose between the two cables can presumably look
|
||
forward to lurid sales presentations from FLAG marketers detailing the
|
||
insane recklessness of SEA-ME-WE 3's approach, and vice versa.
|
||
|
||
At the dirt-and-duct level, the operation in Egypt is much like the one
|
||
in Thailand. The work is being done by Consolidated Contractors, which
|
||
is a fairly interesting multinational contracting firm that is based and
|
||
funded in the Middle East but works all over the globe. Here it is
|
||
laying six 100-mm ducts (10 inside Alexandria proper) as compared with
|
||
only two in Thailand. These ducts are all PVC pipe, but FLAG's duct is
|
||
made of a higher grade of PVC than the others - even than President
|
||
Mubarak's duct.
|
||
|
||
That's right - in a nicely Pharaonic touch, one of the six ducts going
|
||
into the ground here is the sole property of President Hosni Mubarak, or
|
||
(presumably) whoever succeeds him as head of state. It is hard to
|
||
envision why a head of state would want or need his own private tube
|
||
full of air running underneath the Sahara. The obvious guess is that the
|
||
duct might be used to create a secure communications system, independent
|
||
of the civilian and military systems (the Egyptian military will own one
|
||
of the six ducts, and ARENTO will own three). This, in and of itself,
|
||
says something about the relationship between the military and the
|
||
government in Egypt. It is hardly surprising when you consider that
|
||
Mubarak's predecessor was murdered by the military during a parade.
|
||
|
||
Inside the city, where ten rather than six ducts are being prepared,
|
||
they must occasionally sprout up out of the ground and run along the
|
||
undersides of bridges and flyovers. In these sections it is easy to
|
||
identify FLAG's duct because, unlike the others, it is galvanized steel
|
||
instead of PVC. FLAG undoubtedly specified steel for its far greater
|
||
protective value, but in so doing posed a challenge for Engineer
|
||
Musalam, who knew that thieves would attack the system wherever they
|
||
could reach it - not to take the cable but to get their hands on that
|
||
tempting steel pipe. So, wherever the undersides of these bridges and
|
||
flyovers are within 2 or 3 meters of ground level, Engineer Musalam has
|
||
built in special measures to make it virtually impossible for thieves to
|
||
get their hands on FLAG's pipe.
|
||
|
||
For the most part, the duct installation is a simple cut-and-cover
|
||
operation, right down the median strip. But the median is crossed
|
||
frequently by nicely paved, heavily trafficked U-turn routes. To cut or
|
||
block one of these would be unthinkable, since no journey in Egypt is
|
||
complete without numerous U-turns. It is therefore necessary to bore a
|
||
horizontal tunnel under each one, run a 600-mm steel pipe down the
|
||
tunnel, and finally thread the ducts through it. The tunnels are bored
|
||
by laborers operating big manually powered augers. Under a sign reading
|
||
Civil Works: Fiberoptic Link around the Globe, the men had left their
|
||
street clothes carefully wrapped up in plastic bags, on the shoulder of
|
||
the road. They had kicked off their shoes and changed into the
|
||
traditional, loose, ankle-length garment. One by one, they disappeared
|
||
into a tunnel barely big enough to lie down in, carrying empty baskets,
|
||
then returned a few minutes later with baskets full of dirt, looking
|
||
like extras in some new Hollywood costume drama: The Ten Commandments
|
||
Meets the Great Escape.
|
||
|
||
We blundered across Engineer Musalam's path one afternoon. This was
|
||
sheer luck, but also kind of inevitable: other than ditch diggers, the
|
||
only people in the median strip of this highway are hacker tourists and
|
||
ARENTO engineers. He was here because one of the crews working on FLAG
|
||
had, while enlarging a manhole excavation, plunged the blade of their
|
||
backhoe right through the main communications cable connecting Egypt to
|
||
Libya - a 960-circuit coaxial line buried, sans conduit, in the same
|
||
median. Libya had dropped off the net for a while until Mu'ammar
|
||
Gadhafi's eastbound traffic could be shunted to a microwave relay chain
|
||
and an ARENTO repair crew had been mobilized. The quality of such an
|
||
operation is not measured by how frequently cables get broken (usually
|
||
they are broken by other people) but by how quickly they get fixed
|
||
afterward, and by this standard Engineer Musalam runs a tight ship. The
|
||
mishap occurred on a Friday afternoon - the Muslim sabbath - the first
|
||
day of a three-day weekend and a national holiday to boot - 40 years to
|
||
the day after the Suez Canal was handed over to Egypt. Nevertheless, the
|
||
entire hierarchy was gathered around the manhole excavation, from ditch
|
||
diggers hastily imported from another nearby site all the way up to
|
||
Engineer Musalam.
|
||
|
||
The ditch diggers made the hole even larger, whittling out a place for
|
||
one of the splicing technicians to sit. The technicians stood on the
|
||
brink of the pit offering directions, and eventually they jumped into it
|
||
and grabbed shovels; their toolboxes were lowered in after them on
|
||
ropes, and their black dress trousers and crisp white shirts rapidly
|
||
converged on the same color as the dust covered them. In the lee of an
|
||
unburied concrete manhole nearby, a couple of men established a little
|
||
refreshment center: one hubbly-bubbly and one portable stove, shooting
|
||
flames like a miniature oil well fire, where they cranked out glass
|
||
after glass of heavily sweetened tea. This struck me as more efficient
|
||
than the American technique of sending a gofer down to the 7-Eleven for
|
||
a brace of Super Big Gulps. Traffic swirled around the adjacent U-turn;
|
||
motorists rolled their windows down and asked for directions, which were
|
||
cheerfully given. Egyptian males are not afraid to hold hands with each
|
||
other or to ask for directions, which does not mean that they should be
|
||
confused with sensitive New Age males.
|
||
|
||
The mangled ends of the cable were cleanly hacksawed and stripped, and a
|
||
2-meter-long segment of the same type of cable was wrestled out of a car
|
||
and brought into the pit. Two lengths of lead pipe were threaded onto
|
||
it, later to serve as protective bandages for the splices, and then the
|
||
splicing began, one conductor at a time. Engineer Musalam watched
|
||
attentively while I badgered him with nerdy questions.He brought me up
|
||
to speed on the latest submarine cable gossip. During the previous
|
||
month, in mid-June, SEA-ME-WE 2 had been cut twice between Djibouti and
|
||
India. Two cable ships, Restorer and Enterprise, had been sent to fix
|
||
the breaks. But fire had broken out in the engine room of the Enterprise
|
||
(maybe a problem with the dilithium crystals), putting it into repairs
|
||
for four weeks. So Restorer had to fix both breaks. But because of bad
|
||
weather, only one of the faults had been repaired as of July 26. In the
|
||
meantime, all of SEA-ME-WE 2's traffic had been shunted to a satellite
|
||
link reserved as a backup.
|
||
|
||
Satellite links have enough bandwidth to fill in for a second-generation
|
||
optical cable like SEA-ME-WE 2 but not enough to replace a
|
||
third-generation one like FLAG or SEA-ME-WE 3. The cable industry is
|
||
therefore venturing into new and somewhat unexplored territory with the
|
||
current generation of cables. It is out of the question to run such a
|
||
system without having elaborate backup plans, and if satellites can't
|
||
hack it anymore, the only possible backup is on another cable - almost
|
||
by definition, a competing cable. So as intensely as rival companies may
|
||
compete with each other for customers, they are probably cooperating at
|
||
the same time by reserving capacity on each other's systems. This
|
||
presumably accounts for the fact that they are eager to spread nasty
|
||
information about each other but will never do so on the record.
|
||
|
||
I didn't know the exact route of SEA-ME-WE 3 and was intrigued to learn
|
||
that it will be passing through the same building in Alexandria as
|
||
SEA-ME-WE 1 and 2, which is also the same building that will be used by
|
||
FLAG. In addition, there is a new submarine cable called Africa 1 that
|
||
is going to completely encircle that continent, it being much easier to
|
||
circumnavigate Africa with a cable-laying ship than to run ducts and
|
||
cables across it (though I would like to see Alan Wall have a go at it).
|
||
Africa 1 will also pass through Engineer Musalam's building in
|
||
Alexandria, which will therefore serve as the cross-connect among
|
||
essentially all the traffic of Africa, Europe, and Asia.
|
||
|
||
Though Engineer Musalam is not the type who would come out and say it,
|
||
the fact is that in a couple of years he's going to be running what is
|
||
arguably the most important information nexus on the planet.
|
||
|
||
As the sun dropped behind the western Sahara (I imagined Mu'ammar
|
||
Gadhafi out there somewhere, picking up his telephone to hear a fast
|
||
busy signal), Engineer Musalam drove me into Alexandria in his humble
|
||
subcompact to see this planetary nexus.
|
||
|
||
It is an immense neoclassical pile constructed in 1933 by the British to
|
||
house their PTT operations. Since then, it has changed very little
|
||
except for the addition of a window air conditioner in Engineer
|
||
Musalam's office. The building faces Alexandria's railway station across
|
||
an asphalt square crowded with cars, trucks, donkey carts, and
|
||
pedestrians.
|
||
|
||
I do not think any other hacker tourist will ever make it inside this
|
||
building. If you do so much as raise a camera to your face in its
|
||
vicinity, an angry man in a uniform will charge up to you and let you
|
||
get a very good look at the bayonet fixed to the end of his automatic
|
||
weapon. So let me try to convey what it is like:
|
||
|
||
The adjective Blade-Runneresque means much to those who have seen the
|
||
movie. (For those who haven't, just keep reading.) I will, however,
|
||
never again be able to watch Blade Runner, because all of the buildings
|
||
that looked so cool, so exquisitely art-directed in the movie, will now,
|
||
to me, look like feeble efforts to capture a few traces of ARENTO's
|
||
Alexandria station at night.
|
||
|
||
The building is a titanic structure that goes completely dark at night
|
||
and becomes a maze of black corridors that appear to stretch on into
|
||
infinity. Some illumination, and a great deal of generalized din, sifts
|
||
in from the nearby square through broken windows. It has received very
|
||
limited maintenance in the last half-century but will probably stand as
|
||
long as the Pyramids. The urinals alone look like something out of
|
||
Luxor. The building's cavernous stairwells consist of profoundly worn
|
||
white marble steps winding around a central shaft that is occupied by an
|
||
old-fashioned wrought-iron elevator with all of the guts exposed: rails,
|
||
cables, counterweights, and so on. Litter and debris have accumulated at
|
||
the bottom of these pits. At the top, nocturnal birds have found their
|
||
way in through open or broken windows and now tear around in the
|
||
blackness like Stealth fighters, hunting for insects and making eerie
|
||
keening noises - not the twitter of songbirds but the alien screech of
|
||
movie pterodactyls. Gaunt cats prowl soundlessly up and down the stairs.
|
||
A big microwave relay tower has been planted on the roof, and the red
|
||
aircraft warning lights hang in the sky like fat planets. They shed a
|
||
vague illumination back into the building, casting faint cyan shadows.
|
||
Looking into the building's courtyards you may see, for a moment, a
|
||
human figure silhouetted in a doorway by blue fluorescent light. A chair
|
||
sits next to a dust-fogged window that has been cracked open to let in
|
||
cool night air. Down in the square, people are buying and selling, young
|
||
men strolling hand in hand through a shambolic market scene. In the
|
||
windows of apartment buildings across the street, women sit in their
|
||
colorful but demure garments holding tumblers of sweet tea.
|
||
|
||
In the midst of all this, then, you walk through a door into a vast
|
||
room, and there it is: the cable station, rack after rack after rack of
|
||
gleaming Alcatel and Siemens equipment, black phone handsets for the
|
||
order wires, labeled Palermo and Tripoli and Cairo. Taped to a pillar is
|
||
an Arabic prayer and faded photograph of the faithful circling the
|
||
Ka'aba. The equipment here is of a slightly older vintage than what we
|
||
saw in Japan, but only because the cables are older; when FLAG and
|
||
SEA-ME-WE 3 and Africa 1 come through, Engineer Musalam will have one of
|
||
the building's numerous unused rooms scrubbed out and filled with
|
||
state-of-the-art gear.
|
||
|
||
A few engineers pad through the place. The setup is instantly
|
||
recognizable; you can see the same thing anywhere nerds are performing
|
||
the kinds of technical hacks that keep modern governments alive. The
|
||
Manhattan Project, Bletchley Park, the National Security Agency, and, I
|
||
would guess, Saddam Hussein's weapons labs are all built on the same
|
||
plan: a big space ringed by anxious, ignorant, heavily armed men,
|
||
looking outward. Inside that perimeter, a surprisingly small number of
|
||
hackers wander around through untidy offices making the world run.
|
||
|
||
If you turn your back on the equipment through which the world's bits
|
||
are swirling, open one of the windows, wind up, and throw a stone pretty
|
||
hard, you can just about bonk that used book peddler on the head.
|
||
Because this place, soon to be the most important data nexus on the
|
||
planet, happens to be constructed virtually on top of the ruins of the
|
||
Great Library of Alexandria.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ The Lalla Rookh\_\_
|
||
|
||
When William Thomson became Lord Kelvin and entered the second phase of
|
||
his life - tooling around on his yacht, the Lalla Rookh - he appeared to
|
||
lose interest in telegraphy and got sidetracked into topics that, on
|
||
first reading, seem unrelated to his earlier interests - disappointingly
|
||
mundane. One of these was depth sounding, and the other was the nautical
|
||
compass.
|
||
|
||
At the time, depths were sounded by heaving a lead-weighted rope over
|
||
the side of the ship and letting it pay out until it hit bottom. So far,
|
||
so easy, but hauling thousands of meters of soggy rope, plus a lead
|
||
weight, back onto the ship required the efforts of several sailors and
|
||
took a long time. The US Navy ameliorated the problem by rigging it so
|
||
that the weight could be detached and simply discarded on the bottom,
|
||
but this only replaced one problem with another one in that a separate
|
||
weight had to be carried for each sounding. Either way, the job was a
|
||
mess and could be done only rarely. This probably explains why ships
|
||
were constantly running aground in those days, leading to a relentless,
|
||
ongoing massacre of crew and passengers compared to which today's
|
||
problem of bombs and airliners is like a Sunday stroll through Disney
|
||
World.
|
||
|
||
In keeping with his general practice of using subtlety where moronic
|
||
brute force had failed, Kelvin replaced the soggy rope with a piano
|
||
wire, which in turn enabled him to replace the heavy weight with a much
|
||
smaller one. This idea might seem obvious to us now, but it was
|
||
apparently quite the brainstorm. The tension in the wire was so light
|
||
that a single sailor could reel it in by turning a spoked wooden wheel.
|
||
|
||
The first time Kelvin tried this, the wheel began to groan after a while
|
||
and finally imploded. Dental hygienists, or people who floss the way
|
||
they do (using extravagantly long pieces of floss and wrapping the used
|
||
part around a fingertip) will already know why. The first turn of floss
|
||
exerts only light pressure on the finger, but the second turn doubles
|
||
it, and so on, until, as you are coming to the end of the process, your
|
||
fingertip has turned a gangrenous purple. In the same way, the tension
|
||
on Kelvin's piano wire, though small enough to be managed by one man,
|
||
became enormous after a few hundred turns. No reasonable wheel could
|
||
endure such stress.
|
||
|
||
Chagrined and embarrassed, Kelvin invented a stress-relief mechanism. On
|
||
one side of it the wire was tight, on the other side it was slack and
|
||
could be taken up by the wheel without compressing the hub. Once this
|
||
was out of the way, the challenge became how to translate the length of
|
||
piano wire that had been paid out into an accurate depth reading. One
|
||
could never assume that the wire ran straight down to the bottom.
|
||
Usually the vessel was moving, so the lead weight would trail behind it.
|
||
Furthermore, a line stretched between two points in this way forms a
|
||
curve known to mathematicians as a catenary, and of course the curve is
|
||
longer than a straight line between the same two points. Kelvin had to
|
||
figure out what sorts of catenary curves his piano wire would assume
|
||
under various conditions of vessel speed and ocean depth - an
|
||
essentially tedious problem that seems well beneath the abilities of the
|
||
father of thermodynamics.
|
||
|
||
In any case, he figured it out and patented everything. Once again he
|
||
made a ton of money. At the same time, he revolutionized the field of
|
||
bathymetry and probably saved a large number of lives by making it
|
||
easier for mariners to take frequent depth soundings. At the same time,
|
||
he invented a vastly improved form of ship's compass which was as big an
|
||
improvement over the older models as his depth-sounding equipment was
|
||
over the soggy rope. Attentive readers will not be surprised to learn
|
||
that he patented this device and made a ton of money from it.
|
||
|
||
Kelvin had revolutionized the art of finding one's way on the ocean,
|
||
both in the vertical (depth) dimension and in the horizontal (compass)
|
||
dimensions. He had made several fortunes in the process and spent a
|
||
great deal of his intellectual gifts on pursuits that, I thought at
|
||
first, could hardly have been less relevant to his earlier work on
|
||
undersea cables. But that was my problem, not his. I didn't figure out
|
||
what he was up to until very close to the ragged end of my hacker
|
||
tourism binge
|
||
|
||
\_\_ Slack\_\_
|
||
|
||
The first time a cable-savvy person uses the word slack in your
|
||
presence, you'll be tempted to assume he is using it in the loose,
|
||
figurative way - as a layperson uses it. After the eightieth or
|
||
ninetieth time, and after the cable guy has spent a while talking about
|
||
the seemingly paradoxical notion of slack control and extolling the
|
||
sophistication of his ship's slack control systems and his computer's
|
||
slack numerical-simulation software, you begin to understand that slack
|
||
plays as pivotal a role in a cable lay as, say, thrust does in a moon
|
||
mission.
|
||
|
||
He who masters slack in all of its fiendish complexity stands astride
|
||
the cable world like a colossus; he who is clueless about slack either
|
||
snaps his cable in the middle of the ocean or piles it in a snarl on the
|
||
ocean floor - which is precisely what early 19th-century cable layers
|
||
spent most of their time doing.
|
||
|
||
The basic problem of slack is akin to a famous question underlying the
|
||
mathematical field of fractals: How long is the coastline of Great
|
||
Britain? If I take a wall map of the isle and measure it with a ruler
|
||
and multiply by the map's scale, I'll get one figure. If I do the same
|
||
thing using a set of large-scale ordnance survey maps, I'll get a much
|
||
higher figure because those maps will show zigs and zags in the
|
||
coastline that are polished to straight lines on the wall map. But if I
|
||
went all the way around the coast with a tape measure, I'd pick up even
|
||
smaller variations and get an even larger number. If I did it with
|
||
calipers, the number would be larger still. This process can be repeated
|
||
more or less indefinitely, and so it is impossible to answer the
|
||
original question straightforwardly. The length of the coastline of
|
||
Great Britain must be defined in terms of fractal geometry.
|
||
|
||
A cross-section of the seafloor has the same property. The route between
|
||
the landing station at Songkhla, Thailand, and the one at Lan Tao
|
||
Island, Hong Kong, might have a certain length when measured on a map,
|
||
say 2,500 kilometers. But if you attach a 2,500-kilometer cable to
|
||
Songkhla and, wearing a diving suit, begin manually unrolling it across
|
||
the seafloor, you will run out of cable before you reach the public
|
||
beach at Tong Fuk. The reason is that the cable follows the bumpy
|
||
topography of the seafloor, which ends up being a longer distance than
|
||
it would be if the seafloor were mirror-flat.
|
||
|
||
Over long (intercontinental) distances, the difference averages out to
|
||
about 1 percent, so you might need a 2,525-kilometer cable to go from
|
||
Songkhla to Lan Tao. The extra 1 percent is slack, in the sense that if
|
||
you grabbed the ends and pulled the cable infinitely tight (bar tight,
|
||
as they say in the business), it would theoretically straighten out and
|
||
you would have an extra 25 kilometers. This slack is ideally molded into
|
||
the contour of the seafloor as tightly as a shadow, running straight and
|
||
true along the surveyed course. As little slack as possible is employed,
|
||
partly because cable costs a lot of money (for the FLAG cable, $16,000
|
||
to $28,000 per kilometer, depending on the amount of armoring) and
|
||
partly because loose coils are just asking for trouble from trawlers and
|
||
other hazards. In fact, there is so little slack (in the layperson's
|
||
sense of the word) in a well-laid cable that it cannot be grappled and
|
||
hauled to the surface without snapping it.
|
||
|
||
This raises two questions, one simple and one nauseatingly difficult and
|
||
complex. First, how does one repair a cable if it's too tight to haul
|
||
up?
|
||
|
||
The answer is that it must first be pulled slightly off the seafloor by
|
||
a detrenching grapnel, which is a device, meant to be towed behind a
|
||
ship, that rolls across the bottom of the ocean on two fat tractor
|
||
tires. Centered between those tires is a stout, wicked-looking, C-shaped
|
||
hook, curving forward at the bottom like a stinger. It carves its way
|
||
through the muck and eventually gets under the cable and lifts it up and
|
||
holds it steady just above the seafloor. At this point its tow rope is
|
||
released and buoyed off.
|
||
|
||
The ship now deploys another towed device called a cutter, which, seen
|
||
from above, is shaped like a manta ray. On the top and bottom surfaces
|
||
it carries V-shaped blades. As the ship makes another pass over the
|
||
detrenching grapnel, one of these blades catches the cable and severs
|
||
it.
|
||
|
||
It is now possible to get hold of the cut ends, using other grapnels. A
|
||
cable repair ship carries many different kinds of grapnels and other
|
||
hardware, and keeping track of them and their names (like "long prong
|
||
Sam") is sort of like taking a course in exotic marine zoology. One of
|
||
the ends is hauled up on board ship, and a new length of cable is
|
||
spliced onto it solely to provide excess slack. Only now can both ends
|
||
of the cable be brought aboard the ship at the same time and the final
|
||
splice made.
|
||
|
||
But now the cable has way too much slack. It can't just be dumped
|
||
overboard, because it would form an untidy heap on the bottom, easily
|
||
snagged. Worse, its precise location would not be known, which is
|
||
suicide from a legal point of view. As long as a cable's position is
|
||
precisely known and marked on charts, avoiding it is the responsibility
|
||
of every mariner who comes that way. If it's out of place, any snags are
|
||
the responsibility of the cable's owners.
|
||
|
||
So the loose loop of cable must be carefully lowered to the bottom on
|
||
the end of a rope and arranged into a sideways bight that lies alongside
|
||
the original route of the cable something like an oxbow lake beside a
|
||
river channel. The geometry of this bight is carefully recorded with
|
||
sidescan sonar so that the information can be forwarded to the people
|
||
who update the world's nautical charts.
|
||
|
||
One problem: now you have a rope between your ship's winch and the
|
||
recently laid cable. It looks like an old-fashioned, hairy, organic jute
|
||
rope, but it has a core of steel. It is a badass rope, extremely strong
|
||
and heavy and expensive. You could cut it off and drop it, but this
|
||
would waste money and leave a wild rope trailing across the seafloor,
|
||
inviting more snags.
|
||
|
||
So at this point you deploy your submersible remotely operated vehicle
|
||
(ROV) on the end of an umbilical. It rolls across the seabed on its tank
|
||
tracks, finds the rope, and cuts it with its terrifying hydraulic
|
||
guillotine.
|
||
|
||
Sad to say, that was the answer to the easy question. The hard one goes
|
||
like this: You are the master of a cable ship just off Songkhla, and you
|
||
have taken on 2,525 kilometers of cable which you are about to lay along
|
||
the 2500-kilometer route between there and Tong Fuk Beach on Lan Tao
|
||
Island. You have the 1 percent of slack required. But 1 percent is just
|
||
an average figure for the whole route. In some places the seafloor is
|
||
rugged and may need 5 percent slack; in others it is perfectly flat and
|
||
the cable may be laid straight as a rod. Here's the question: How do you
|
||
ensure that the extra 25 kilometers ends up where it's supposed to?
|
||
|
||
Remember that you are on a ship moving up and down on the waves and that
|
||
you will be stretching the cable out across a distance of several
|
||
kilometers between the ship and the contact point on the ocean floor,
|
||
sometimes through undersea currents. If you get it wrong, you'll get
|
||
suspensions in the cable, which will eventually develop into faults, or
|
||
you'll get loops, which will be snagged by trawlers. Worse yet, you
|
||
might actually snap the cable. All of these, and many more entertaining
|
||
things, happened during the colorful early years of the cable business.
|
||
|
||
The answer has to do with slack control. And most of what is known about
|
||
slack control is known by Cable & Wireless Marine. AT\&T presumably
|
||
knows about slack control too, but Cable & Wireless Marine has twice as
|
||
many ships and dominates the deep-sea cable-laying industry. The
|
||
Japanese can lay cable in shallow water and can repair it anywhere. But
|
||
the reality is that when you want to slam a few thousand kilometers of
|
||
state-of-the-art optical fiber across a major ocean, you call Cable &
|
||
Wireless Marine, based in England. That is pretty much what FLAG did
|
||
several years ago.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ In which the Hacker Tourist treks to Land's end, the haunt of
|
||
Druids, Pirates, and Telegraphers.\_\_
|
||
|
||
An idyllic hike to the tiny Cornish town of Porthcurno. More flagon
|
||
hoisting at the Cable Station. Lord Kelvin's handiwork examined and
|
||
explained. Early bits. The surveyors of the oceans in Chelmsford, and
|
||
how computers play an essential part in their work. Alexander Graham
|
||
Bell, the second Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lord, and his misguided
|
||
analog detour. Legacy of Kelvin, Bell, and FLAG to the wired world.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ 50° 3.965' N, 5° 42.745 WLand's End, Cornwall, England\_\_
|
||
|
||
As anyone can see from a map of England, Cornwall is a good jumping-off
|
||
place for cables across the Atlantic, whether they are laid westward to
|
||
the Americas or southward to Spain or the Azores. A cable from this
|
||
corner of the island needs to traverse neither the English Channel nor
|
||
the Irish Sea, both of which are shallow and fraught with shipping.
|
||
Cornwall also possesses the other necessary prerequisite of a cable
|
||
landing site in that it is an ancient haunt of pirates and smugglers and
|
||
is littered with ceremonial ruins left behind by shadowy occult figures.
|
||
The cable station here is called Porthcurno.
|
||
|
||
Not knowing exactly where Porthcurno is (it is variously marked on maps,
|
||
if marked at all), the hacker tourist can find it by starting at Land's
|
||
End, which is unambiguously located (go to England; walk west until the
|
||
land ends). He can then walk counterclockwise around the coastline. The
|
||
old fractal question of "How long is the coastline of Great Britain"
|
||
thus becomes more than a purely abstract exercise. The answer is that in
|
||
Cornwall it is much longer than it looks, because the fractal dimension
|
||
of the place is high - Cornwall is bumpy. All of the English people I
|
||
talked to before getting here told me that the place was rugged and wild
|
||
and beautiful, but I snidely assumed that they meant "by the standards
|
||
of England." As it turns out, Cornwall is rugged and wild and beautiful
|
||
even by the standards of, say, Northern California. In America we assume
|
||
that any place where humans have lived for more than a generation has
|
||
been pretty thoroughly screwed up, so it is startling to come to a place
|
||
where 2,000-year-old ruins are all over the place and find that it is
|
||
still virtually a wilderness.
|
||
|
||
From Land's End you can reach Porthcurno in two or three hours,
|
||
depending on how much time you spend gawking at views, clambering up and
|
||
down cliffs, exploring caves, and taking dips at small perfect beaches
|
||
that can be found wedged into clefts in the rock.
|
||
|
||
Cables almost never land in industrial zones, first because such areas
|
||
are heavily traveled and frequently dredged, second because of pure
|
||
geography. Industry likes rivers, which bring currents, which are bad
|
||
for cables. Cities like flat land. But flat land above the tide line
|
||
implies a correspondingly gentle slope below the water, meaning that the
|
||
cable will pass for a greater distance through the treacherous shallows.
|
||
Three to thirty meters is the range of depth where most of the ocean
|
||
dynamics are and where cable must be armored. But in wild places like
|
||
Porthcurno or Lan Tao Island, rivers are few and small, and the land
|
||
bursts almost vertically from the sea. The same geography, of course,
|
||
favors pirates and smugglers.
|
||
|
||
The company that laid the first part of it was called the Falmouth,
|
||
Gibraltar and Malta Telegraph Company, which is odd because the cable
|
||
never went to Falmouth - a major port some 50 kilometers from
|
||
Porthcurno. Enough anchors had hooked cables, even by that point, that
|
||
"major port" and "submarine cable station" were seen to be incompatible,
|
||
so the landing site was moved to Porthcurno.That was just the beginning:
|
||
the company (later called the Eastern Cable Company, after all the
|
||
segments between Porthcurno and Darwin merged) was every bit as
|
||
conscious of the importance of redundancy as today's Internet architects
|
||
- probably more so, given the unreliability of early cables. They ran
|
||
another cable from Porthcurno to the Azores and then to Ascension
|
||
Island, where it forked: one side headed to South America while the
|
||
other went to Cape Town and then across the Indian Ocean. Subsequent
|
||
transatlantic cables terminated at Porthcurno as well.
|
||
|
||
Many of the features that made Cornwall attractive to cable operators
|
||
also made it a suitable place to conduct transatlantic radio
|
||
experiments, and so in 1900 Guglielmo Marconi himself established a
|
||
laboratory on Lizard Point, which is directly across the bay from
|
||
Porthcurno, some 30 kilometers distant. Marconi had another station on
|
||
the Isle of Wight, a few hundred kilometers to the east, and when he
|
||
succeeded in sending messages between the two, he constructed a more
|
||
powerful transmitter at the Lizard station and began trying to send
|
||
messages to a receiver in Newfoundland. The competitive threat to the
|
||
cable industry could hardly have been more obvious, and so the Eastern
|
||
Telegraph Company raised a 60-meter mast above its Porthcurno site,
|
||
hoisted an antenna, and began eavesdropping on Marconi's transmissions.
|
||
A couple of decades later, after the Italian had worked the bugs out of
|
||
the system, the government stepped in and arranged a merger between his
|
||
company and the submarine cable companies to create a new, fully
|
||
integrated communications monopoly called Cable & Wireless.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ 50° 2.602' N5° 39.054' WMuseum of Submarine Telegraphy, Porthcurno,
|
||
Cornwall\_\_
|
||
|
||
On a sunny summer day, Porthcurno Beach was crowded with holiday makers.
|
||
The vast majority of these were scantily clad and tended to face toward
|
||
the sun and the sea. The fully clothed and heavily shod tourists with
|
||
their backs to the water were the hacker tourists; they were headed for
|
||
a tiny, windowless cement blockhouse, scarcely big enough to serve as a
|
||
one-car garage, planted at the apex of the beach. There was a sign on
|
||
the wall identifying it as the Museum of Submarine Telegraphy and
|
||
stating that it is open only on Wednesday and Friday.
|
||
|
||
This was appalling news. We arrived on a Monday morning, and our
|
||
maniacal schedule would not brook a two-day wait. Stunned, heartbroken,
|
||
we walked around the thing a couple of times, which occupied about 30
|
||
seconds. The lifeguard watched us uneasily. We admired the brand-new
|
||
manhole cover set into the ground in front of the hut, stamped with the
|
||
year '96, which strongly suggested a connection with FLAG. We wandered
|
||
up the valley for a couple of hundred meters until it opened up into a
|
||
parking lot for beach-goers, surrounded by older white masonry
|
||
buildings. These were well-maintained but did not seem to be used for
|
||
much. We peered at a couple of these and speculated (wrongly, as it
|
||
turned out) that they were the landing station for FLAG.
|
||
|
||
Tantalizing hints were everywhere: the inevitable plethora of manholes,
|
||
networked to one another by long straight strips of new pavement set
|
||
into the parking lot and the road. Nearby, a small junkheap containing
|
||
several lengths of what to the casual visitor might look like old, dirty
|
||
pipe but which on closer examination proved to be hunks of discarded
|
||
coaxial cable. But all the buildings were locked and empty, and no one
|
||
was around.
|
||
|
||
Our journey seemed to have culminated in failure. We then noticed that
|
||
one of the white buildings had a sign on the door identifying it as The
|
||
Cable Station - Free House. The sign was adorned with a painting of a
|
||
Victorian shore landing in progress - a line of small boats supporting a
|
||
heavy cable being payed out from a sailing ship anchored in Porthcurno
|
||
Bay.
|
||
|
||
After coming all this way, it seemed criminal not to have a drink in
|
||
this pub. By hacker tourist standards, a manhole cover counts as a major
|
||
attraction, and so it was almost surreal to have stumbled across a place
|
||
that had seemingly been conceived and built specifically for us. Indeed,
|
||
we were the only customers in the place. We admired the photographs and
|
||
paintings on the walls, which all had something or other to do with
|
||
cables. We made friends with Sally the Dog, chatted with the
|
||
proprietress, grabbed a pint, and went out into the beer garden to drown
|
||
our sorrows.
|
||
|
||
Somewhat later, we unburdened ourselves to the proprietress, who looked
|
||
a bit startled to learn of our strange mission, and said, "Oh, the
|
||
fellows who run the museum are inside just now."
|
||
|
||
Faster than a bit speeding down an optical fiber we were back inside the
|
||
pub where we discovered half a dozen distinguished gentlemen sitting
|
||
around a table, finishing up their lunches. One of them, a tall,
|
||
handsome, craggy sort, apologized for having ink on his fingers. We made
|
||
some feeble effort to explain the concept of Wired magazine (never
|
||
easy), and they jumped up from their seats, pulled key chains out of
|
||
their pockets, and took us across the parking lot, through the gate, and
|
||
into the museum proper. We made friends with Minnie the Cable Dog and
|
||
got the tour. Our primary guides were Ron Werngren (the gent with ink on
|
||
his fingers, which I will explain in a minute) and John Worrall, who is
|
||
the cheerful, energetic, talkative sort who seems to be an obligatory
|
||
feature of any cable-related site.
|
||
|
||
All of these men are retired Cable & Wireless employees. They sketched
|
||
in for us the history of this strange compound of white buildings. Like
|
||
any old-time cable station, it housed the equipment for receiving and
|
||
transmitting messages as well as lodgings and support services for the
|
||
telegraphers who manned it. But in addition it served as the campus of a
|
||
school where Cable & Wireless foreign service staff were trained,
|
||
complete with dormitories, faculty housing, gymnasium, and dining hall.
|
||
|
||
The whole campus has been shut down since 1970. In recent years, though,
|
||
the gentlemen we met in the pub, with the assistance of a local
|
||
historical trust, have been building and operating the Museum of
|
||
Submarine Telegraphy here. These men are of a generation that trained on
|
||
the campus shortly after World War II, and between them they have lived
|
||
and worked in just as many exotic places as the latter-day cable guys we
|
||
met on Lan Tao Island: Buenos Aires, Ascension Island, Cyprus, Jordan,
|
||
the West Indies, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Trinidad, Dubai.
|
||
|
||
Fortunately, the tiny hut above the beach is not the museum. It's just
|
||
the place where the cables are terminated. FLAG and other modern cables
|
||
bypass it and terminate in a modern station up at the head of the
|
||
valley, so
|
||
all of the cables in this hut are old and out of service. They are
|
||
labeled with the names of the cities where they terminate: Faial in the
|
||
Azores, Brest in France, Bilbao in Spain, Gibraltar 1, Saint John's in
|
||
Newfoundland, the Isles of Scilly, two cables to Carcavelos in Portugal,
|
||
Vigo in Spain, Gibraltar 2 and 3. From this hut, the wires proceed up
|
||
the valley a couple hundred meters to the cable station proper, which is
|
||
encased in solid rock.
|
||
|
||
During World War II, the Porthcurno cable nexus was such a painfully
|
||
obvious target for a Nazi attack that a detachment of Cornish miners
|
||
were brought in to carve a big tunnel out of a rock hill that rises
|
||
above the campus. This turned out to be so wet that it was necessary to
|
||
then construct a house inside the tunnel, complete with pitched roof,
|
||
gutters, and downspouts to carry away the eternal drizzle of
|
||
groundwater. The strategically important parts of the cable station were
|
||
moved inside. Porthcurno Bay and the Cable & Wireless campus were laced
|
||
with additional defensive measures, like a fuel-filled pipe underneath
|
||
the water to cremate incoming Huns.
|
||
|
||
Now the house in the tunnel is the home of the museum. It is sealed from
|
||
the outside world by two blast doors, each of which consists of a
|
||
foot-thick box welded together from inch-thick steel plate. The inner
|
||
door has a gasket to keep out poison gas. Inside, the building is clean
|
||
and almost cozy, and except for the lack of windows, one is not
|
||
conscious of being underground.
|
||
|
||
Practically the first thing we saw upon entering was a fully functional
|
||
Kelvin mirror galvanometer - the exquisitely sensitive detector that
|
||
sent Wildman Whitehouse into ignominy, made the first transatlantic
|
||
cable useful, and earned William Thomson his first major fortune. Most
|
||
of its delicate innards are concealed within a metal case. The beam of
|
||
light that reflects off its tiny twisting mirror shines against a long
|
||
horizontal screen of paper, marked and numbered like a yardstick,
|
||
extending about 10 inches on either side of a central zero point. The
|
||
light forms a spot on this screen about the size and shape of a dime cut
|
||
in half. It is so sensitive that merely touching the machine's case -
|
||
grounding it - causes the spot of light to swing wildly to one end of
|
||
the scale.
|
||
|
||
At Porthcurno this device was used for more than one purpose. One of the
|
||
most important activities at a cable station is pinpointing the
|
||
locations of faults, which is done by measuring the resistance in the
|
||
cable. Since the resistance per unit of length is a known quantity, a
|
||
precise measurement of resistance gives the distance to the fault.
|
||
Measuring resistance was done by use of a device called a Wheatstone
|
||
bridge. The museum has a beautiful one, built in a walnut box with big
|
||
brass knobs for dialing in resistances. Use of the Wheatstone bridge
|
||
relies on achieving a null current with the highest attainable level of
|
||
precision, and for this purpose, no instrument on earth was better
|
||
suited than the Kelvin mirror galvanometer. Locating a mid-ocean fault
|
||
in a cable therefore was reduced to a problem of twiddling the dials on
|
||
the Wheatstone bridge until the galvanometer's spot of light was
|
||
centered on the zero mark.
|
||
|
||
The reason for the ink on Ron Werngren's fingers became evident when we
|
||
moved to another room and beheld a genuine Kelvin siphon recorder, which
|
||
he was in the process of debugging. This machine represented the first
|
||
step in the removal of humans from the global communications loop that
|
||
has culminated in the machine room at cable landing stations like
|
||
Ninomiya.
|
||
|
||
After Kelvin's mirror galvanometer became standard equipment throughout
|
||
the wired world, every message coming down the cables had to pass,
|
||
briefly, through the minds of human operators such as the ones who were
|
||
schooled at the Porthcurno campus. These were highly trained young men
|
||
in slicked hair and starched collars, working in teams of two or three:
|
||
one to watch the moving spot of light and divine the letters, a second
|
||
to write them down, and, if the message were being relayed down another
|
||
cable, a third to key it in again.
|
||
|
||
It was clear from the very beginning that this was an error-prone
|
||
process, and when the young men in the starched collars began getting
|
||
into fistfights, it also became clear that it was a job full of stress.
|
||
The stress derived from the fact that if the man watching the spot of
|
||
light let his attention wander for one moment, information would be
|
||
forever lost. What was needed was some mechanical way to make a record
|
||
of the signals coming down the cable. But because of the weakness of
|
||
these signals, this was no easy job.
|
||
|
||
Lord Kelvin, never one to rest on his laurels, solved the problem with
|
||
the siphon recorder. For all its historical importance, and for all the
|
||
money it made Kelvin, it is a flaky-looking piece of business. There is
|
||
a reel of paper tape which is drawn steadily through the machine by a
|
||
motor. Mounted above it is a small reservoir containing perhaps a
|
||
tablespoon of ink. What looks like a gossamer strand emerges from the
|
||
ink and bends around through some delicate metal fittings so that its
|
||
other end caresses the surface of the moving tape. This strand is
|
||
actually an extremely thin glass tube that siphons the ink from the
|
||
reservoir onto the paper. The idea is that the current in the cable, by
|
||
passing through an electromechanical device, will cause this tube to
|
||
move slightly to one side or the other, just like the spot of light in
|
||
the mirror galvanometer. But the current in the old cables was so feeble
|
||
that even the infinitesimal contact point between the glass tube and the
|
||
tape still induced too much friction, so Kelvin invented a remarkable
|
||
kludge: he built a vibrator into the system that causes the glass tube
|
||
to thrum like a guitar string so that its point of contact on the paper
|
||
is always in slight motion.
|
||
|
||
Dynamic friction (between moving objects) is always less than static
|
||
friction (between objects that are at rest with respect to each other).
|
||
The vibration in the glass siphon tube reduced the friction against the
|
||
paper tape to the point where even the weak currents in a submarine
|
||
cable could move it back and forth. Movement to one side of the tape
|
||
represented a dot, to the other side a dash. We prevailed upon Werngren
|
||
to tap out the message Get Wired.The result is on the cover of this
|
||
magazine, and if you know Morse code you can pick the letters out
|
||
easily.
|
||
|
||
The question naturally arises: How does one go about manufacturing a
|
||
hollow glass tube thinner than a hair? More to the point, how did they
|
||
do it 100 years ago? After all, as Worrall pointed out, they needed to
|
||
be able to repair these machines when they were posted out on Ascension
|
||
Island. The answer is straightforward and technically sweet: you take a
|
||
much thicker glass tube, heat it over a Bunsen burner until it glows and
|
||
softens, and then pull sharply on both ends. It forms a long, thin
|
||
tendril, like a string of melted cheese stretching away from a piece of
|
||
pizza. Amazingly, it does not close up into a solid glass fiber, but
|
||
remains a tube no matter how thin it gets.
|
||
|
||
Exactly the same trick is used to create the glass fibers that run down
|
||
the center of FLAG and other modern submarine cables: an ingot of very
|
||
pure glass is heated until it glows, and then it is stretched. The only
|
||
difference is that these are solid fibers rather than tubes, and, of
|
||
course, it's all done using machines that assure a consistent result.
|
||
|
||
Moving down the room, we saw a couple of large tabletops devoted to a
|
||
complete, functioning reproduction of a submarine cable system as it
|
||
might have looked in the 1930s. The only difference is that the
|
||
thousands of miles of intervening cable are replaced with short jumper
|
||
wires so that transmitter, repeaters, and receiver are contained within
|
||
a single room.
|
||
|
||
All the equipment is built the way they don't build things anymore:
|
||
polished wooden cabinets with glass tops protecting gleaming brass
|
||
machinery that whirrs and rattles and spins. Relays clack and things
|
||
jiggle up and down. At one end of the table is an autotransmitter that
|
||
reads characters off a paper tape, translates them into Morse code or
|
||
cable code, and sends its output, in the form of a stream of electrical
|
||
pulses, to a regenerator/retransmitter unit. In this case the unit is
|
||
only a few feet away, but in practice it would have been on the other
|
||
end of a long submarine cable, say in the Azores. This
|
||
regenerator/retransmitter unit sends its output to a twin siphon-tube
|
||
recorder which draws both the incoming signal (say, from London) and the
|
||
outgoing signal as regenerated by this machine on the same paper tape at
|
||
the same time. The two lines should be identical. If the machine is not
|
||
functioning correctly, it will be obvious from a glance at the tape.
|
||
|
||
The regenerated signal goes down the table (or down another submarine
|
||
cable) to a machine that records the message as a pattern of holes
|
||
punched in tape. It also goes to a direct printer that hammers out the
|
||
words of the message in capital letters on another moving strip of
|
||
paper. The final step is a gummer that spreads stickum on the back of
|
||
the tape so that it may be stuck onto a telegraph form. (They tried to
|
||
use pregummed tape, but in the tropics it only coated the machinery with
|
||
glue.)
|
||
|
||
Each piece of equipment on this tabletop is built around a motor that
|
||
turns over at the same precise frequency. None of it would work - no
|
||
device could communicate with any other device - unless all of those
|
||
motors were spinning in lockstep with one another. The transmitter,
|
||
regenerator/retransmitter, and printer all had to be in sync even though
|
||
they were thousands of miles apart.
|
||
|
||
This feat is achieved by means of a collection of extremely precise
|
||
analog machinery. The heart of the system is another polished box that
|
||
contains a vibrating reed, electromagnetically driven, thrumming along
|
||
at 30 cycles per second, generating the clock pulses that keep all the
|
||
other machines turning over at the right pace. The reed is as precise as
|
||
such a thing can be, but over time it is bound to drift and get out of
|
||
sync with the other vibrating reeds in the other stations.
|
||
|
||
In order to control this tendency, a pair of identical pendulum clocks
|
||
hang next to each other on the wall above. These clocks feed steady,
|
||
one-second timing pulses into the box housing the reed. The reed, in
|
||
turn, is driving a motor that is geared so that it should turn over at
|
||
one revolution per second, generating a pulse with each revolution. If
|
||
the frequency of the reed's vibration begins to drift, the motor's speed
|
||
will drift along with it, and the pulse will come a bit too early or a
|
||
bit too late. But these pulses are being compared with the steady
|
||
one-second pulses generated by the double pendulum clock, and any
|
||
difference between them is detected by a feedback system that can
|
||
slightly speed up or slow down the vibration of the reed in order to
|
||
correct the error. The result is a clock so steady that once one of them
|
||
is set up in, say, London, and another is set up in, say, Cape Town, the
|
||
machinery in those two cities will remain synched with each other
|
||
indefinitely.
|
||
|
||
This is precisely the same function that is performed by the quartz
|
||
clock chip at the heart of any modern computing device. The job
|
||
performed by the regenerator/retransmitter is also perfectly
|
||
recognizable to any modern digitally minded hacker tourist: it is an
|
||
analog-to-digital converter. The analog voltages come down the cable
|
||
into the device, the circuitry in the box decides whether the signal is
|
||
a dot or a dash (or if you prefer, a 1 or a 0), and then an
|
||
electromagnet physically moves one way or the other, depending on
|
||
whether it's a dot or a dash. At that moment, the device is strictly
|
||
digital. The electromagnet, by moving, then closes a switch that
|
||
generates a new pulse of analog voltage that moves on down the cable.
|
||
The hacker tourist, who has spent much of his life messing around with
|
||
invisible, ineffable bits, can hardly fail to be fascinated when staring
|
||
into the guts of a machine built in 1927, steadily hammering out bits
|
||
through an electromechanical process that can be seen and even touched.
|
||
|
||
As I started to realize, and as John Worrall and many other
|
||
cable-industry professionals subsequently told me, there have been new
|
||
technologies but no new ideas since the turn of the century. Alas for
|
||
Internet chauvinists who sneer at older, "analog" technology, this rule
|
||
applies to the transmission of digital bits down wires, across long
|
||
distances. We've been doing it ever since Morse sent "What hath God
|
||
wrought\!" from Washington to Baltimore.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ (Latitude & longitude unknown)Cable & Wireless MarineChelmsford,
|
||
England\_\_
|
||
|
||
\[Note: I left my GPS receiver on a train in Bristol and had to do
|
||
without it for a couple of weeks until Mr. Gallagher, station supervisor
|
||
at Preston, Lancashire, miraculously found it and sent it back to me.
|
||
Chelmsford is a half-hour train ride northeast of London.\]
|
||
|
||
When last we saw our hypothetical cable-ship captain, sitting off of
|
||
Songkhla with 2,525 kilometers of very expensive cable, we had put him
|
||
in a difficult spot by asking the question of how he could ensure that
|
||
his 25 kilometers of slack ended up in exactly the right place.
|
||
Essentially the same question was raised a few years ago when FLAG
|
||
approached Cable & Wireless Marine and said, in effect: "We are going to
|
||
buy 28,000 kilometers of fancy cable from AT\&T and KDD, and we would
|
||
like to have it go from England to Spain to Italy to Egypt to Dubai to
|
||
India to Thailand to Hong Kong to China to Korea to Japan. We would like
|
||
to pay for as little slack as possible, because the cable is expensive.
|
||
What little slack we do buy needs to go in exactly the right place,
|
||
please. What should we do next?"
|
||
|
||
So it was that Captain Stuart Evans's telephone rang. At the time
|
||
(September 1992), he was working for a company called Worldwide Ocean
|
||
Surveying, but by the time we met him, that company had been bought out
|
||
by Cable & Wireless Marine, of which he is now general manager - survey.
|
||
Evans is a thoroughly pleasant middle-aged fellow, a former merchant
|
||
marine captain, who seemed just a bit taken aback that anyone would care
|
||
about the minute details of what he and his staff do for a living. A
|
||
large part of being a hacker tourist is convincing people that you are
|
||
really interested in the nitty-gritty and not just looking for a quick,
|
||
painless sound bite or two; once this is accomplished, they always warm
|
||
to the task, and Captain Evans was no exception.Evans's mission was to
|
||
help FLAG select the most economical and secure route. The initial
|
||
stages of the process are straightforward: choose the landing sites and
|
||
then search existing data concerning the routes joining those sites.
|
||
This is referred to as a desk search, with mild but unmistakable
|
||
condescension. Evans and his staff came up with a proposed route, did
|
||
the desk search, and sent it to FLAG for approval. When FLAG signed off
|
||
on this, it was time to go out and perform the real survey. This process
|
||
ran from January to September 1994.
|
||
|
||
Each country uses the same landing sites over and over again for each
|
||
new cable, so you might think that the routes from, say, Porthcurno to
|
||
Spain would be well known by now. In fact, every new cable passes over
|
||
some virgin territory, so a survey is always necessary. Furthermore, the
|
||
territory does not remain static. There are always new wrecks, mobile
|
||
sand waves, changes in anchorage patterns, and other late-breaking news.
|
||
|
||
To lay a cable competently you must have a detailed survey of a corridor
|
||
surrounding the intended route. In shallow water, you have relatively
|
||
precise control over where the cable ends up, but the bottom can be very
|
||
irregular, and the cable is likely to be buried into the seabed. So you
|
||
want a narrow (1 kilometer wide) corridor with high resolution. In
|
||
deeper water, you have less lateral control over the descending cable,
|
||
but at the same time the phenomena you're looking at are bigger, so you
|
||
want a survey corridor whose width is 2 to 3 times the ocean depth but
|
||
with a coarser resolution. A resolution of 0.5 percent of the depth
|
||
might be considered a minimum standard, though the FLAG survey has it
|
||
down to 0.25 percent in most places. So, for example, in water 5,000
|
||
meters deep, which would be a somewhat typical value away from the
|
||
continental shelf, the survey corridor would be 10 to 15 kilometers in
|
||
width, and a good vertical resolution would be 12 meters.
|
||
|
||
The survey process is almost entirely digital. The data is collected by
|
||
a survey ship carrying a sonar rig that fires 81 beams spreading down
|
||
and out from the hull in a fan pattern. At a depth of 5,000 meters, the
|
||
result, approximately speaking, is to divide the 10-kilometer-wide
|
||
corridor into grid squares 120 meters wide and 175 meters long and get
|
||
the depth of each one to a precision of some 12 meters.
|
||
|
||
The raw data goes to an onboard SPARCstation that performs data
|
||
assessment in real time as a sort of quality assurance check, then
|
||
streams the numbers onto DAT cassettes. The survey team is keeping an
|
||
eye on the results, watching for any formations through which cable
|
||
cannot be run. These are found more frequently in the Indian than in the
|
||
Atlantic Ocean, mostly because the Atlantic has been charted more
|
||
thoroughly.
|
||
|
||
Steep slopes are out. A cable that traverses a steep slope will always
|
||
want to slide down it sideways, secretly rendering every nautical chart
|
||
in the world obsolete while imposing unknown stresses on the cable. This
|
||
and other constraints may throw an impassable barrier across the
|
||
proposed route of the cable. When this happens, the survey ship has to
|
||
backtrack, move sideways, and survey other corridors parallel and
|
||
adjacent to the first one, gradually building a map of a broader area,
|
||
until a way around the obstruction is found. The proposed route is
|
||
redrafted, and the survey ship proceeds.
|
||
|
||
The result is a shitload of DAT tapes and a good deal of other data as
|
||
well. For example, in water less than 1,200 meters deep, they also use
|
||
sidescan sonar to generate analog pictures of the bottom - these look
|
||
something like black-and-white photographs taken with a point light
|
||
source, with the exception that shadows are white instead of black. It
|
||
is possible to scan the same area from several different directions and
|
||
then digitally combine the images to make something that looks just like
|
||
a photo. This may provide crucial information that would never show up
|
||
on the survey - for example, a dense pattern of anchor scars indicates
|
||
that this is not a good place to lay a cable. The survey ship can also
|
||
drop a flowmeter that will provide information about currents in the
|
||
ocean.
|
||
|
||
The result of all this, in the case of the FLAG survey, was about a
|
||
billion data points for the bathymetric survey alone, plus a mass of
|
||
sidescan sonar plots and other documentation. The tapes and the plots
|
||
filled a room about 5 meters square all the way to the ceiling. The
|
||
quantity of data involved was so vast that to manage it on paper, while
|
||
it might have been theoretically possible given unlimited resources, was
|
||
practically impossible given that FLAG is run by mortals and actually
|
||
has to make money. FLAG is truly an undertaking of the digital age in
|
||
that it simply couldn't have been accomplished without the use of
|
||
computers to manage the data.Evans's mission was to present FLAG with a
|
||
final survey report. If he had done it the old-fashioned way, the report
|
||
would have occupied some 52 linear feet of shelf space, plus several
|
||
hefty cabinets full of charts, and the inefficiency of dealing with so
|
||
much paper would have made it nearly impossible for FLAG's decision
|
||
makers }to grasp everything.
|
||
|
||
Instead, Evans bought FLAG a PC and a plotter. During the summer of
|
||
1994, while the survey data was still being gathered, he had some
|
||
developers write browsing software. Keeping in mind that FLAG's
|
||
investors were mostly high-finance types with little technical or
|
||
nautical background, they gave the browser a familiar, easy-to-use
|
||
graphical user interface. The billion data points and the sidescan sonar
|
||
imagery were boiled down into a form that would fit onto 5 CD-ROMs, and
|
||
in that form the final report was presented to FLAG at the end of 1994.
|
||
When FLAG's decision makers wanted to check out a particular part of the
|
||
route, they could zoom in on it by clicking on a map, picking a small
|
||
square of ocean, and blowing it up to reveal sev-eral different kinds of
|
||
plots: a topographic map of the seafloor, information abstracted from
|
||
the sidescan sonar images, a depth profile along the route, and another
|
||
profile showing the consistency of the bot-tom - whether muck, gravel,
|
||
sand, or hard rock. All of these could be plotted out on meterwide
|
||
sheets of paper that provided a much higher-resolution view than is
|
||
afforded by the computer screen.
|
||
|
||
This represents a noteworthy virtuous circle - a self-amplifying trend.
|
||
The development of graphical user interfaces has led to rapid growth in
|
||
personal computer use over the last decade, and the coupling of that
|
||
technology with the Internet has caused explosive growth in the use of
|
||
the World Wide Web, generating enormous demand for bandwidth. That (in
|
||
combination, of course, with other demands) creates a demand for
|
||
submarine cables much longer and more ambitious than ever before, which
|
||
gets investors excited - but the resulting project is so complex that
|
||
the only way they can wrap their minds around it and make intelligent
|
||
decisions is by using a computer with a graphical user interface.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ Hacking wires\_\_
|
||
|
||
As you may have figured out by this point, submarine cables are an
|
||
incredible pain in the ass to build, install, and operate. Hooking stuff
|
||
up to the ends of them is easy by comparison. So it has always been the
|
||
case that cables get laid first and then people begin trying to think of
|
||
new ways to use them. Once a cable is in place, it tends to be treated
|
||
not as a technological artifact but almost as if it were some naturally
|
||
occurring mineral formation that might be exploited in any number of
|
||
different ways.
|
||
|
||
This was true from the beginning. The telegraphy equipment of 1857
|
||
didn't work when it was hooked up to the first transatlantic cable.
|
||
Kelvin had to invent the mirror galvanometer, and later the siphon
|
||
recorder, to make use of it. Needless to say, there were many other
|
||
Victorian hackers trying to patent inventions that would enable more
|
||
money to be extracted from cables. One of these was a
|
||
Scottish-Canadian-American elocutionist named Alexander Graham Bell, who
|
||
worked out of a laboratory in Boston.
|
||
|
||
Bell was one of a few researchers pursuing a hack based on the
|
||
phenomenon of resonance. If you open the lid of a grand piano, step on
|
||
the sustain pedal, and sing a note into it, such as a middle C, the
|
||
strings for the piano's C keys will vibrate sympathetically, while the D
|
||
strings will remain still. If you sing a D, the D strings vibrate and
|
||
the C strings don't. Each string resonates only at the frequency to
|
||
which it has been tuned and is deaf to other frequencies.
|
||
|
||
If you were to hum out a Morse code pattern of dots and dashes, all at
|
||
middle C, a deaf observer watching the strings would notice a
|
||
corresponding pattern of vibrations. If, at the same time, a second
|
||
person was standing next to you humming an entirely different sequence
|
||
of dots and dashes, but all on the musical tone of D, then a second deaf
|
||
observer, watching the D strings, would be able to read that message,
|
||
and so on for all the other tones on the scale. There would be no
|
||
interference between the messages; each would come through as clearly as
|
||
if it were the only message being sent. But anyone who wasn't deaf would
|
||
hear a cacophony of noise as all the message senders sang in different
|
||
rhythms, on different notes. If you took this to an extreme, built a
|
||
special piano with strings tuned as close to each other as possible, and
|
||
trained the message senders to hum Morse code as fast as possible, the
|
||
sound would merge into an insane roar of white noise.
|
||
|
||
Electrical oscillations in a wire follow the same rules as acoustical
|
||
ones in the air, so a wire can carry exactly the same kind of cacophony,
|
||
with the same results. Instead of using piano strings, Bell and others
|
||
were using a set of metal reeds like the ones in a harmonica, each tuned
|
||
to vibrate at a different frequency. They electrified the reeds in such
|
||
a way that they generated not only acoustical vibrations but
|
||
corresponding electrical ones. They sought to combine the electrical
|
||
vibrations of all these reeds into one complicated waveform and feed it
|
||
into one end of a cable. At the far end of the cable, they would feed
|
||
the signal into an identical set of reeds. Each reed would vibrate in
|
||
sympathy only with its counterpart on the other end of the wire, and by
|
||
recording the pattern of vibrations exhibited by that reed, one could
|
||
extract a Morse code message independent of the other messages being
|
||
transmitted on the other reeds. For the price of one wire, you could
|
||
send many simultaneous coded messages and have them all sort themselves
|
||
out on the other end.
|
||
|
||
To make a long story short, it didn't work. But it did raise an
|
||
interesting question. If you could take vibrations at one frequency and
|
||
combine them with vibrations at another frequency, and another, and
|
||
another, to make a complicated waveform, and if that waveform could be
|
||
transmitted to the other end of a submarine cable intact, then there was
|
||
no reason in principle why the complex waveform known as the human voice
|
||
couldn't be transmitted in the same way. The only difference would be
|
||
that the waves in this case were merely literal representations of sound
|
||
waves, rather than Morse code sequences transmitted at different
|
||
frequencies. It was, in other words, an analog hack on a digital
|
||
technology.
|
||
|
||
We have all been raised to think of the telephone as a vast improvement
|
||
on the telegraph, as the steamship was to the sailing ship or the
|
||
electric lightbulb to the candle, but from a hacker tourist's point of
|
||
view, it begins to seem like a lamentable wrong turn. Until Bell, all
|
||
telegraphy was digital. The multiplexing system he worked on was purely
|
||
digital in concept even if it did make use of some analog properties of
|
||
matter (as indeed all digital equipment does). But when his multiplexing
|
||
scheme went sour, he suddenly went analog on us.
|
||
|
||
Fortunately, the story has a happy ending, though it took a century to
|
||
come about. Because analog telephony did not require expertise in Morse
|
||
code, anyone could take advantage of it. It became enormously popular
|
||
and generated staggering quantities of revenue that underwrote the
|
||
creation of a fantastically immense communications web reaching into
|
||
every nook and cranny of every developed country.
|
||
|
||
Then modems came along and turned the tables. Modems are a digital hack
|
||
on an analog technology, of course; they take the digits from your
|
||
computer and convert them into a complicated analog waveform that can be
|
||
transmitted down existing wires. The roar of white noise that you hear
|
||
when you listen in on a modem transmission is exactly what Bell was
|
||
originally aiming for with his reeds. Modems, and everything that has
|
||
ensued from them, like the World Wide Web, are just the latest example
|
||
of a pattern that was established by Kelvin 140 years ago, namely,
|
||
hacking existing wires by inventing new stuff to put on the ends of
|
||
them.
|
||
|
||
It is natural, then, to ask what effect FLAG is going to have on the
|
||
latest and greatest cable hack: the Internet. Or perhaps it's better to
|
||
ask whether the Internet affected FLAG. The explosion of the Web
|
||
happened after FLAG was planned. Taketo Furuhata, president and CEO of
|
||
IDC, which runs the Miura station, says: "I don't know whether Nynex
|
||
management foresaw the burst of demand related to the Internet a few
|
||
years ago - I don't think so. Nobody - not even AT\&T people - foresaw
|
||
this. But the demand for Internet transmission is so huge that FLAG will
|
||
certainly become a very important pipe to transmit such requirements."
|
||
|
||
John Mercogliano, vice president - Europe, Nynex Network Systems
|
||
(Bermuda) Ltd., says that during the early 1990s when FLAG was getting
|
||
organized, Nynex executives felt in their guts that something big was
|
||
going to happen involving broadband multimedia transmission over cables.
|
||
They had a media lab that was giving demos of medical imaging and other
|
||
such applications. "We knew the Internet was coming - we just didn't
|
||
know it was going to be called the Internet," he says.
|
||
|
||
FLAG may, in fact, be the last big cable system that was planned in the
|
||
days when people didn't know about the Internet. Those days were a lot
|
||
calmer in the global telecom industry. Everything was controlled by
|
||
monopolies, and cable construction was based on sober, scientific
|
||
forecasts, analogous, in some ways, to the actuarial tables on which
|
||
insurance companies predicate their policies.
|
||
|
||
When you talk on the phone, your words are converted into bits that are
|
||
sent down a wire. When you surf the Web, your computer sends out bits
|
||
that ask for yet more bits to be sent back. When you go to the store and
|
||
buy a Japanese VCR or an article of clothing with a Made in Thailand
|
||
label, you're touching off a cascade of information flows that
|
||
eventually leads to transpacific faxes, phone calls, and money
|
||
transfers.
|
||
|
||
If you get a fast busy signal when you dial your phone, or if your Web
|
||
browser stalls, or if the electronics store is always low on inventory
|
||
because the distribution system is balled up somewhere, then it means
|
||
that someone, somewhere, is suffering pain. Eventually this pain gets
|
||
taken out on a fairly small number of meek, mild-mannered statisticians
|
||
- telecom traffic forecasters - who are supposed to see these problems
|
||
coming.
|
||
|
||
Like many other telephony-related technologies, traffic forecasting was
|
||
developed to a fine art a long time ago and rarely screwed up. Usually
|
||
the telcos knew when the capacity of their systems was going to be
|
||
stretched past acceptable limits. Then they went shopping for bandwidth.
|
||
Cables got built.
|
||
|
||
That is all past history. "The telecoms aren't forecasting now,"
|
||
Mercogliano says. "They're reacting."
|
||
|
||
This is a big problem for a few different reasons. One is that cables
|
||
take a few years to build, and, once built, last for a quarter of a
|
||
century. It's not a nimble industry in that way. A PTT thinking about
|
||
investing in a club cable is making a 25-year commitment to a piece of
|
||
equipment that will almost certainly be obsolete long before it reaches
|
||
the end of its working life. Not only are they risking lots of money,
|
||
but they are putting it into an exceptionally long-term investment.
|
||
Long-term investments are great if you have reliable long-term
|
||
forecasts, but when your entire forecasting system gets blown out of the
|
||
water by something like the Internet, the situation gets awfully
|
||
complicated.
|
||
|
||
The Internet poses another problem for telcos by being asymmetrical.
|
||
Imagine you are running an international telecom company in Japan.
|
||
Everything you've ever done, since TPC-1 came into Ninomiya in '64, has
|
||
been predicated on circuits. Circuits are the basic unit you buy and
|
||
sell - they are to you what cars are to a Cadillac dealership. A
|
||
circuit, by definition, is symmetrical. It consists of an equal amount
|
||
of bandwidth in each direction - since most phone conversations, on
|
||
average, entail both parties talking about the same amount. A circuit
|
||
between Japan and the United States is something that enables data to be
|
||
sent from Japan to the US, and from the US to Japan, at the same rate -
|
||
the same bandwidth. In order to get your hands on a circuit, you cut a
|
||
deal with a company in the States. This deal is called a correspondent
|
||
agreement.
|
||
|
||
One day, you see an ad in a magazine for a newfangled thing called a
|
||
modem. You hook one end up to a computer and the other end to a phone
|
||
line, and it enables the computer to grab a circuit and exchange data
|
||
with some other computer with a modem. So far, so good. As a cable-savvy
|
||
type, you know that people have been hacking cables in this fashion
|
||
since Kelvin. As long as the thing works on the basis of circuits, you
|
||
don't care - any more than a car salesman would care if someone bought
|
||
Cadillacs, tore out the seats, and used them to haul gravel.
|
||
|
||
A few years later, you hear about some modem-related nonsense called the
|
||
World Wide Web. And a year after that, everyone seems to be talking
|
||
about it. About the same time, all of your traffic forecasts go down the
|
||
toilet. Nothing's working the way it used to. Everything is screwed up.
|
||
|
||
Why? Because the Web is asymmetrical. All of your Japanese Web customers
|
||
are using it to access sites in the States, because that's where all the
|
||
sites are located. When one of them clicks on a button on an American
|
||
Web page, a request is sent over the cable to the US. The request is
|
||
infinitesimal, just a few bytes. The site in the States promptly
|
||
responds by trying to send back a high-resolution, 24-bit color image of
|
||
Cindy Crawford, or an MPEG film of a space shuttle mission. Millions of
|
||
bytes. Your pipe gets jammed solid with incoming packets.
|
||
|
||
You're a businessperson. You want to make your customers happy. You want
|
||
them to get their millions of bytes from the States in some reasonable
|
||
amount of time. The only way to make this happen is to purchase more
|
||
circuits on the cables linking Japan to the States. But if you do this,
|
||
only half of each circuit is going to be used - the incoming half. The
|
||
outgoing half will carry a miserable trickle of packets. Its bandwidth
|
||
will be wasted. The correspondent agreement relationship, which has been
|
||
the basis of the international telecom business ever since the first
|
||
cables were laid, doesn't work anymore.
|
||
|
||
This, in combination with the havoc increasingly being wrought by
|
||
callback services, is weird, bad, hairy news for the telecom monopolies.
|
||
Mercogliano believes that the solution lies in some sort of bandwidth
|
||
arbitrage scheme, but talking about that to an old-time telecrat is like
|
||
describing derivative investments to an old codger who keeps his money
|
||
under his mattress. "The club system is breaking down," Mercogliano
|
||
says.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ Somewhere between50° 54.20062' N, 1° 26.87229 W and50° 54.20675' N,
|
||
1° 26.95470 WCable Ship Monarch, Southampton, England\_\_
|
||
|
||
John Mercogliano, if this is conceivable, logs even more frequent-flier
|
||
miles, to even more parts of the planet, than the cable layers we met on
|
||
Lan Tao Island. He lives in London, his office is in Amsterdam, his
|
||
territory is Europe, he works for a company headquartered in Bermuda
|
||
that has many ties to the New York metropolitan area and that does
|
||
business everywhere from Porthcurno to Miura. He is trim, young-looking,
|
||
and vigorous, but even so the schedule occasionally takes its toll on
|
||
him, and he feels the need to just get away from his job for a few days
|
||
and think about something - anything - other than submarine cables. The
|
||
last time this feeling came over him, he made inquiries with a tourist
|
||
bureau in Ireland that referred him to a quiet, out-of-the-way place on
|
||
the coast: a stately home that had been converted to a seaside inn, an
|
||
ideal place for him to go to get his mind off his work. Mercogliano flew
|
||
to Ireland and made his way overland to the place, checked into his
|
||
room, and began ambling through the building. The first thing he saw was
|
||
a display case containing samples of various types of 19th-century
|
||
submarine cables. It turned out that the former owner of this mansion
|
||
had been the captain of the Great Eastern, the first of the great
|
||
deep-sea cable-laying ships.
|
||
|
||
The Great Eastern got that job because it was by a long chalk the
|
||
largest ship on the planet at the time - so large that its utter
|
||
uselessness had made it a laughingstock, the Spruce Goose of its day.
|
||
The second generation of long-range submarine cables, designed to Lord
|
||
Kelvin's specifications after the debacle of 1857, were thick and heavy.
|
||
Splicing segments together in mid-ocean had turned out to be
|
||
problematical, so there were good reasons for wanting to make the cable
|
||
in one huge piece and simply laying the whole thing in one go.
|
||
|
||
It is easier to splice cables now and getting easier all the time.
|
||
Coaxial cables of the last few decades took some 36 to 48 hours to
|
||
splice, partly because it was necessary to mold a jacket around them.
|
||
Modern cables can be spliced in more like 12 hours, depending on the
|
||
number of fibers they contain. So modern cable ships needn't be quite as
|
||
great as the Great Eastern.
|
||
|
||
Other than the tank that contains the cable, which is literally nothing
|
||
more than a big round hole in the middle of the ship, a cable ship is
|
||
different from other ships in two ways. One, it comes with a complement
|
||
of bow and stern thrusters coupled to exquisitely sensitive navigation
|
||
gear on the bridge, which give it unsurpassed precision-maneuvering and
|
||
station-keeping powers. In the case of Monarch, a smaller cable repair
|
||
ship that we visited in Southampton, England, there are at least two
|
||
differential GPS receivers, one for the bow and one for the stern -
|
||
hence the two readings given at the head of this section. Each one of
|
||
them reads out to five decimal places, which implies a resolution of
|
||
about 1 centimeter.
|
||
|
||
Second, a cable ship has two winches on board. But this does not do
|
||
justice to them, as they are so enormous, so powerful, and yet so nimble
|
||
that it would almost be more accurate to say that a cable ship is two
|
||
floating winches. Nearly everything that a cable ship does reduces,
|
||
eventually, to winching. Laying a cable is a matter of paying cable out
|
||
of a winch, and repairing it, as already described, involves a much more
|
||
complicated series of winch-related activities.
|
||
|
||
As Kelvin figured out the hard way, whenever you are reeling in a long
|
||
line, you must first relieve all tension on it or else your reel will be
|
||
crushed. The same problem is posed in reverse by the cable-laying
|
||
process, where thousands of meters of cable, weighing many tons, may be
|
||
stretched tight between the ship and the contact point on the seafloor,
|
||
but the rest of the cable stored on board the ship must be coiled
|
||
loosely in the tanks with no tension on them at all. In both cases, the
|
||
cable must be perfectly slack on the ship end and very tight on the
|
||
watery end of the winching machinery. Not surprisingly, then, the same
|
||
machinery is used for both outgoing and incoming winch work.
|
||
|
||
At one end of the ship is a huge iron drum some 3 meters in diameter
|
||
with a few turns of cable around it. As you can verify by wrapping a few
|
||
turns of rope around a pipe and tugging, this is a very simple way to
|
||
relieve tension on a line. It is not, however, very precise, and here,
|
||
precise control is very important. That is provided by something called
|
||
a linear engine, which consists of several pairs of tires mounted with a
|
||
narrow gap between them (for you baseball fans, it is much like a
|
||
pitching machine). The cable is threaded through this gap so that it is
|
||
gripped on both sides by the tires. Monarch's linear engine contains 16
|
||
pairs of tires which, taken together, can provide up to 10 tons of
|
||
holdback force. Augmented by the drums, which can be driven by power
|
||
from the ship's main engines, the ultimate capacity of Monarch's cable
|
||
engines is 30 tons.
|
||
|
||
The art of laying a submarine cable is the art of using all the special
|
||
features of such a ship: the linear engines, the maneuvering thrusters,
|
||
and the differential GPS equipment, to put the cable exactly where it is
|
||
supposed to go. Though the survey team has examined a corridor many
|
||
thousands of meters wide, the target corridor for the cable lay is 200
|
||
meters wide, and the masters of these ships take pride in not straying
|
||
more than 10 meters from the charted route. This must be accomplished
|
||
through the judicious manipulation of only a few variables: the ship's
|
||
position and speed (which are controlled by the engines, thrusters, and
|
||
rudder) andthe cable's tension and rate of payout (which are controlled
|
||
by the cable engine).
|
||
|
||
One cannot merely pay the cable out at the same speed as the ship moves
|
||
forward. If the bottom is sloping down and away from the ship as the
|
||
ship proceeds, it is necessary to pay the cable out faster. If the
|
||
bottom is sloping up toward the ship, the cable must come out more
|
||
slowly . Such calculations are greatly complicated by the fact that the
|
||
cable is stretched out far behind the ship - the distance between the
|
||
ship and the cable's contact point on the bottom of the ocean can be
|
||
more than 30 kilometers, and the maximum depth at which (for example)
|
||
KDD cable can be laid is 8,000 meters. Insofar as the shape of the
|
||
bottom affects what the ship ought to be doing, it's not the shape of
|
||
the bottom directly below the ship that is relevant, but the shape of
|
||
the bottom wherever the contact point happens to be located, which is by
|
||
no means a straightforward calculation. Of course, the ship is heaving
|
||
up and down on the ocean and probably being shoved around by wind and
|
||
currents while all this is happening, and there is also the possibility
|
||
of ocean currents that may move the cable to and fro during its descent.
|
||
|
||
It is not, in other words, a seat-of-the-pants kind of deal; the skipper
|
||
can't just sit up on the bridge, eyeballing a chart, and twiddling a few
|
||
controls according to his intuition. In practice, the only way to ensure
|
||
that the cable ends up where it is supposed to is to calculate the whole
|
||
thing ahead of time. Just as aeronautical engineers create numerical
|
||
simulations of hypothetical airplanes to test their coefficient of drag,
|
||
so do the slack control wizards of Cable & Wireless Marine use numerical
|
||
simulation techniques to model the catenary curve adopted by the cable
|
||
as it stretches between ship and contact point. In combination with
|
||
their detailed data on the shape of the ocean floor, this enables them
|
||
to figure out, in advance, exactly what the ship should do when. All of
|
||
it is boiled down into a set of instructions that is turned over to the
|
||
master of the cable ship: at such and such a point, increase speed to x
|
||
knots and reduce cable tension to y tons and change payout speed to z
|
||
meters per second, and so on and so forth, all the way from Porthcurno
|
||
to Miura."
|
||
|
||
It sounds like it would make a good videogame," I said to Captain Stuart
|
||
Evans after he had laid all of this out for me. I was envisioning
|
||
something called SimCable. "It would make a good videogame," he agreed,
|
||
"but it also makes a great job, because it's a combination of art and
|
||
science and technique - and it's not an art you learn overnight. It's
|
||
definitely a black art."
|
||
|
||
Cable & Wireless's Marine Survey department has nailed the slack control
|
||
problem. That, in combination with the company's fleet of cable-laying
|
||
ships and its human capital, makes it dominant in the submarine
|
||
cable-laying world.
|
||
|
||
By "human capital" I mean their ability to dispatch weather-beaten
|
||
operatives such as the Lan Tao Island crowd to difficult places like
|
||
Suez and have them know their asses from their elbows. As we discovered
|
||
on our little jaunt to Egypt, where we tried to rendezvous with a cable
|
||
ship in the Gulf of Suez and were turned back by the Egyptian military,
|
||
one doesn't just waltz into places like that on short notice and get
|
||
stuff to happen.
|
||
|
||
In each country between England and Japan, there are hoops that must be
|
||
jumped through, cultural differences that must be understood, palms that
|
||
must be greased, unwritten rules that must be respected. The only way to
|
||
learn that stuff is to devote a career to it. Cable & Wireless has an
|
||
institutional memory stretching all the way back to 1870, when it laid
|
||
the first cable from Porthcurno to Australia, and the British maritime
|
||
industry as a whole possesses a vast fund of practical experience that
|
||
is the legacy of the Empire.
|
||
|
||
One can argue that, in the end, the British Empire did Britain
|
||
surprisingly little good. Other European countries that had pathetic or
|
||
nonexistent empires, such as Italy, have recently surpassed England in
|
||
standard of living and other measures of economic well-being. Scholars
|
||
of economic history have worked up numbers suggesting that Britain spent
|
||
more on maintaining its empire than it gained from exploiting it.
|
||
Whether or not this is the case, it is quite obvious from looking at the
|
||
cable-laying industry that the Victorian practice of sending British
|
||
people all over the planet is now paying them back handsomely.
|
||
|
||
The current position of AT\&T versus Cable & Wireless reflects the shape
|
||
of America versus the shape of the British Empire. America is a big,
|
||
contiguous mass, easy to defend, immensely wealthy, and basically
|
||
insular. No one comes close to it in developing new technologies, and
|
||
AT\&T has always been one of America's technological leaders. By
|
||
contrast, the British Empire was spread out all over the place, and
|
||
though it controlled a few big areas (such as India and Australia), it
|
||
was basically an archipelago of outposts, let us say a network,
|
||
completely dependent on shipping and communications to stay alive. Its
|
||
dominance was always more economic than military - even at the height of
|
||
the Victorian era, its army was smaller than the Prussian police force.
|
||
It could coerce the natives, but only so far - in the end, it had to
|
||
co-opt them, give them some incentive to play along. Even though the
|
||
Empire has been dissolving itself for half a century, British people and
|
||
British institutions still know how to get things done everywhere.
|
||
|
||
It is not difficult to work out how all of this has informed the
|
||
development of the submarine cable industry. AT\&T makes really, really
|
||
good cables; it has the pure technology nailed, though if it doesn't
|
||
stay on its toes, it'll be flattened by the Japanese. Cable & Wireless
|
||
doesn't even try to make cables, but it installs them better than anyone
|
||
else.
|
||
|
||
\_\_ The legacy\_\_
|
||
|
||
Kelvin founded the cable industry by understanding the science, and
|
||
developing the technology, that made it work. His legacy is the ongoing
|
||
domination of the cable-laying industry by the British, and his monument
|
||
is concealed beneath the waves: the ever growing web of submarine cables
|
||
joining continents together.
|
||
|
||
Bell founded the telephone industry. His legacy was the Bell System, and
|
||
his monument was strung up on poles for all to see: the network of
|
||
telephone wires that eventually found its way into virtually every
|
||
building in the developed world. Bell founded New England Telephone
|
||
Company, which eventually was absorbed into the Bell System. It never
|
||
completely lost its identity, though, and it never forgot its connection
|
||
to Alexander Graham Bell - it even moved Bell's laboratory into its
|
||
corporate headquarters in Boston.
|
||
|
||
After the breakup of the Bell System in the early 1980s, New England
|
||
Telephone and its sibling Baby Bell, New York Telephone, joined together
|
||
to form a new company called Nynex, whose loyal soldiers are eager to
|
||
make it clear that they see themselves as the true heirs of Bell's
|
||
legacy.
|
||
Now, Nynex and Cable & Wireless, the brainchildren of Bell and Kelvin,
|
||
the two supreme ninja hacker mage lords of global telecommunications,
|
||
have formed an alliance to challenge AT\&T and all the other old
|
||
monopolies.
|
||
|
||
We know how the first two acts of the story are going to go: In late
|
||
1997, with the completion of FLAG, Luke ("Nynex") Skywalker, backed up
|
||
on his Oedipal quest by the heavy shipping iron of Han ("Cable &
|
||
Wireless") Solo, will drop a bomb down the Death Star's ventilation
|
||
shaft. In 1999, with the completion of SEA-ME-WE 3, the Empire will
|
||
Strike Back. There is talk of a FLAG 2, which might represent some kind
|
||
of a Return of the Jedi scenario.
|
||
|
||
But once the first FLAG has been built, everyone's going to get into the
|
||
act - it's going to lead to a general rebellion. "FLAG will change the
|
||
way things are done. They are setting a benchmark," says Dave Handley,
|
||
the cable layer. And Mercogliano makes a persuasive case that national
|
||
telecom monopolies will be so preoccupied, over the next decade, with
|
||
building the "last mile" and getting their acts together in a
|
||
competitive environment that they'll have no choice but to leave cable
|
||
laying to the entrepreneurs.
|
||
|
||
That's the simple view of what FLAG represents. It is important to
|
||
remember, though, that companies like Cable & Wireless and Nynex are not
|
||
really heroic antimonopolists. A victory for FLAG doesn't lead to a pat
|
||
ending like in Star Wars - it does not get us into an idealized free
|
||
market. "One thing to bear in mind is that Cable & Wireless is a club
|
||
and they are rigorously anticompetitive wherever they have the
|
||
opportunity," said Doug Barnes, the cypherpunk. "Nynex and the other
|
||
Baby Bells are self-righteously trying to crack open other companies'
|
||
monopolies while simultaneously trying to hold onto their domestic ones.
|
||
The FLAG folks are merely clubs with a smidgin more vision, enough
|
||
business sense to properly reward talent, and a profound desire to make
|
||
a great pile of money.''
|
||
|
||
There has been a lot of fuss in the last few years concerning the 50th
|
||
anniversary of the invention of the computer. Debates have raged over
|
||
who invented the computer: Atanasoff or Mauchly or Turing? The only
|
||
thing that has been demonstrated is that, depending on how you define
|
||
computer, any one of the above, and several others besides, can be said
|
||
to have invented it.
|
||
|
||
Oddly enough, this debate comes at a time when stand-alone computers are
|
||
seeming less and less significant and the Internet more so. Whether or
|
||
not you agree that "the network is the computer," a phrase Scott McNealy
|
||
of Sun Microsystems recently coined, you can't dispute that moving
|
||
information around seems to have much broader appeal than processing it.
|
||
Many more people are interested in email and the Web than were
|
||
interested in databases and spreadsheets.
|
||
|
||
Yet little attention has been paid to the historical antecedents of the
|
||
Internet - perhaps partly because these cable technologies are much
|
||
older and less accessible and partly because many Net people want so
|
||
badly to believe that the Net is fundamentally new and unique. Analog is
|
||
seen as old and bad, and so many people assume that the communications
|
||
systems of old were strictly analog and have just now been upgraded to
|
||
digital.
|
||
|
||
This overlooks much history and totally misconstrues the technology. The
|
||
first cables carried telegraphy, which is as purely digital as anything
|
||
that goes on inside your computer. The cables were designed that way
|
||
because the hackers of a century and a half ago understood perfectly
|
||
well why digital was better. A single bit of code passing down a wire
|
||
from Porthcurno to the Azores was apt to be in sorry shape by the time
|
||
it arrived, but precisely because it was a bit, it could easily be
|
||
abstracted from the noise, then recognized, regenerated, and transmitted
|
||
anew.
|
||
|
||
The world has actually been wired together by digital communications
|
||
systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that
|
||
time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between
|
||
Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive
|
||
that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set
|
||
fire to City Hall.
|
||
|
||
It's tempting to observe that, so far, no one has gotten sufficiently
|
||
excited over a hot new Web page to go out and burn down a major
|
||
building. But this is a little too glib. True, that mob in the streets
|
||
of New York in 1858 was celebrating the ability to send messages quickly
|
||
across the Atlantic. But, if the network is the computer, then in
|
||
retrospect, those torch-bearing New Yorkers could be seen as celebrating
|
||
the joining of the small and primitive computer that was the North
|
||
American telegraph system to the small and primitive computer that was
|
||
the European system, to form The Computer, with a capital C.
|
||
|
||
At that time, the most important components of these Computers - the
|
||
CPUs, as it were - were tense young men in starched collars. Whenever
|
||
one of them stepped out to relieve himself, The Computer went down. As
|
||
good as they were at their jobs, they could process bits only so fast,
|
||
so The Computer was very slow. But The Computer has done nothing since
|
||
then but get faster, become more automated, and expand. By 1870, it
|
||
stretched all the way to Australia. The advent of analog telephony
|
||
plunged The Computer into a long dormant phase during which it grew
|
||
immensely but lost many of its computerlike characteristics.
|
||
|
||
But now The Computer is fully digital once again, fully automatic, and
|
||
faster than hell. Most of it is in the United States, because the United
|
||
States is large, free, and made of dirt. Largeness eliminates
|
||
troublesome borders. Freeness means that anyone is allowed to patch new
|
||
circuits onto The Computer. Dirt makes it possible for anyone with a
|
||
backhoe to get in on the game. The Computer is striving mightily to grow
|
||
beyond the borders of the United States, into a world that promises even
|
||
vaster economies of scale - but most of that world isn't made of dirt,
|
||
and most of it isn't free. The lack of freedom stems both from bad laws,
|
||
which are grudgingly giving way to deregulation, and from monopolies
|
||
willing to do all manner of unsavory things in order to protect their
|
||
turf.
|
||
|
||
Even though FLAG's bandwidth isn't that great by 1996 Internet
|
||
standards, and even though some of the companies involved in it are, in
|
||
other arenas, guilty of monopolistic behavior, FLAG really is going to
|
||
help blow open bandwidth and weaken the telecom monopolies.
|
||
|
||
In many ways it hearkens back to the wild early days of the cable
|
||
business. The first transatlantic cables, after all, were constructed by
|
||
private investors who, like FLAG's investors, just went out and built
|
||
cable because it seemed like a good idea. After FLAG, building new
|
||
high-bandwidth, third-generation fiber-optic cable is going to seem like
|
||
a good idea to a lot of other investors. And unlike the ones who built
|
||
FLAG, they will have the benefit of knowing about the Internet, and
|
||
perhaps of understanding, at some level, that they are not merely
|
||
stringing fancy telephone lines but laying down new traces on the
|
||
circuit board of The Computer. That understanding may lead them to
|
||
create vast amounts of bandwidth that would blow the minds of the
|
||
entrenched telecrats and to adopt business models designed around
|
||
packet-switching instead of the circuits that the telecrats are stuck
|
||
on.
|
||
|
||
If the network is The Computer, then its motherboard is the crust of
|
||
Planet Earth. This may be the single biggest drag on the growth of The
|
||
Computer, because Mother Earth was not designed to be a motherboard.
|
||
There is too much water and not enough dirt. Water favors a few
|
||
companies that know how to lay cable and have the ships to do it. Those
|
||
companies are about to make a whole lot of money.
|
||
|
||
Eventually, though, new ships will be built. The art of slack control
|
||
will become common knowledge - after all, it comes down to a numerical
|
||
simulation problem, which should not be a big chore for the
|
||
ever-expanding Computer. The floors of the oceans will be surveyed and
|
||
sidescanned down to every last sand ripple and anchor scar. The physical
|
||
challenges, in other words, will only get easier.
|
||
|
||
The one challenge that will then stand in the way of The Computer will
|
||
be the cultural barriers that have always hindered cooperation between
|
||
different peoples. As the globe-trotting cable layers in Papa Doc's
|
||
demonstrate, there will always be a niche for people who have gone out
|
||
and traveled the world and learned a thing or two about its ways.
|
||
|
||
Hackers with ambitions of getting involved in the future expansion of
|
||
The Computer could do a lot worse than to power down their PCs, buy GPS
|
||
receivers, place calls to their favorite travel agents, and devote some
|
||
time to the pursuit of hacker tourism.
|
||
|
||
The motherboard awaits.
|