April 19th 2010

The Physical Internet

Internet

It’s easy to take all the Internet’s technical infrastructure for granted sometimes when all of this instantaneous communication happens so effortlessly.

Wired magazine has recently published a fascinating series of photos which highlight the very physical backbone of the Internet and show all the different places (data centers, optic fiber pipes) where the magic happens.

Here are five seemingly picturesque images, which are in fact major points on the Internet’s journey as data flashes from sea to wired sea. In this example, data reaching an office in downtown Los Angeles, California will have traversed the entire North American continent, starting from the Canadian city of Halifax and passing thorough the American states of New York, Virginia and Missouri.

Crazy, isn’t it?!

See the original article from Wired Magazine here.

 

This modest indentation on the Canadian coastline is a major Internet landmark, where a submarine cable comes ashore under the manhole. This particular bit traversed the ocean in about 0.0028 second.

Halifax, Canada (note cable point on left)

The bit now passes through the beating heart of the American Internet: 60 Hudson Street, downtown Manhattan. More transatlantic and transcontinental lines come together in New York than anywhere else in the country.

New York City (server storage centre)

Now the bit goes to the Network Access Point of the Capital Region, a massive data center which sits at the intersection of the major data pipes going across the country and down the coast.

Culpeper, Virginia (data centre)

internet4

Kansas City, Missouri (cabling by track)

Grover Beach, California. A major landing point for data traffic from Asia and South America, the station at Grover Beach sends and receives about 32 petabits of traffic per day. As our bit streams through the Pacific Crossing-1 cable (underneath the four posts, left), it’s on the same trail as some of the most important information in the world: stock reports from the Nikkei Index, weather updates from Singapore, emails from China — all moving at millions of miles an hour through the very physical, very real Internet.

Grover Beach, California (under sea cabling reaches USA)