Blog 3: A City of Cables

These two chapters Blum seemed to focus a lot on the cables that connect the Internet. He went into detail about when he went to go observe workers install some of the fiber lines in the heart of New York City. This was really interesting to learn about how they connected the new lines to the old. It was also interesting to see how long the process actually takes to install these new lines. They basically have to pop off the cover that seals these underground tunnels and place a casing that stretches to the place they are trying to connect their lines. In this case it ended up being about a quarter mile. They then have to put the cables inside these tubes and connect the old to the new. The way Blum describes these underground wires as if the tunnels are crowded with them. It was also cool to know that they reused a lot of the space that telegraph wires inhabited decades ago.

Blum also focused a lot on the cables that span the oceans of Earth. This is something that was new to me knowing that cables actually connected the Internet to people in different countries. It seems weird to have cables that go underwater and have to travel such distances just to be able to connect people. It also blew my mind the speed at which you can still retrieve data from different countries. The miles that these cables have to span to connect each of us and it can take mere seconds to get data or communicate with people long distances away. Something else that stood out to me in these chapters was how expansive and sophisticated the Internet actually is. What I mean by this is the example Blum gave us of an earthquake that happened near Japan and it took out 7 of the 9 major cables that were underwater. How they were able to solve the issue of the 2 working cables being overloaded was rerouting the traffic to other lines that went the other way around the world. It also shows how difficult it would be to take out the Internet.

Questions:

Do you think we will get to a point where we have too many cables crowding cities? Blum made it seem like it was easy to pop off the cover of these tunnels because of how jam packed they were with cables.

Do you ever think we will progress enough with technology to not have to use cables to connect to us to the Internet?