Fibre Internet Quotes

There are at least three ways in which bubbles can be useful. First, the bubble may facilitate innovation and encourage more people to become entrepreneurs, which ultimately feeds into future economic growth.9 Second, the new technology developed by bubble companies may help stimulate future innovations, and bubble companies may themselves use the technology developed during the bubble to move into a different industry. Third, bubbles may provide capital for technological projects that would not be financed to the same extent in a fully efficient financial market. Many historical bubbles have been associated with transformative technologies, such as railways, bicycles, automobiles, fibre optics and the Internet. William Janeway, who was a highly successful venture capitalist during the Dot-Com Bubble, argues that several economically beneficial technologies would not have been developed without the assistance of bubbles.10

due to the precision of the optical electron oscillation frequency within strontium or aluminium. 30. Train of identical nearly single-cycle optical pulses. The spectrum of the pulse train looks like the teeth of a comb, hence it is called a frequency comb. ‘Optical clockwork’ of this kind allows the comparison of disparate frequencies with such remarkable precision that it provides a means to test the tenets of relativity, and thus to understand better the role of light in defining space and time. Frequency, and thus time, is the physical quantity that can be measured with the highest precision of any quantity, by far. Optical telecommunications Frequency combs are also important in telecommunications links based on light. In Chapter 3, I described how optical waves could be guided along a fibre or in a glass ‘chip’. This phenomenon underpins the long-distance telecommunications infrastructure that connects people across different continents and powers the Internet. The reason it is so effective is that light-based communications have much more capacity for carrying information than do electrical wires, or even microwave cellular networks. This makes possible massive data transmission, such as that needed to deliver video on demand over the Internet. Many telecommunications companies offer ‘fibre optic broadband’ deals. A key feature of these packages is the high speed—up to 100 megabytes per second (MBps)—at which data may be received and transmitted. A byte is a number of bits, each of which is a 1 or a 0. Information is sent over fibres as a sequence of ‘bits’, which are decoded by your computer or mobile phone into intelligible video, audio, or text messages. In optical communications, the bits are represented by the intensity of the light beam—typically low intensity is a 0 and higher intensity a 1. The more of these that arrive per second, the faster the communication rate. The MBps speed of the package specifies how rapidly we can transmit and receive information over that company’s link.

In a groundbreaking study published in the journal Nature, Dr Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia discovered communication networks in stands of Douglas firs, which she dubbed the ‘Wood Wide Web’, suggesting the connectivity of trees. This research has been popularized by German naturalist Peter Wohlleben in his bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees. He describes how oaks and beeches share information using microscopic fungal filaments, comparing these to fibre-optic Internet cables. ‘One teaspoon of forest soil contains many miles of these “hyphae”. Over centuries a single fungus can cover many square kilometres and network an entire forest. The fungal connections transmit signals from one tree to the next, helping them exchange news about insects, drought, and other dangers.

The message left Kiel at a speed of 300,000 kilometres per second. The sequence of words keyed into Erwin Suess’s laptop at the Geomar Centre entered the net in digital form. Converted by laser diodes into optical pulses, the information raced along with a wavelength of 1.5 thousandths of a millimetre, shooting down a transparent fibreoptic cable with millions of phone conversations and packets of data. The fibres bundled the stream of light until it was no thicker than two hairs, while total internal reflection stopped it escaping. Whizzing towards the coast, the waves surged along the overland cable, speeding through amplifiers every fifty kilometres until the fibres vanished into the sea, protected by copper casing and thick rubber tubing, and strengthened by powerful wires. The underwater cable was as thick as a muscular forearm. It stretched out across the shelf, buried in the seabed to protect it from anchors and fishing-boats. TAT 14, as it was officially known, was a transatlantic cable linking Europe to the States. Its capacity was higher than that of almost any other cable in the world. There were dozens of such cables in the North Atlantic alone. Hundreds of thousands of kilometres of optical fibre extended across the planet, making up the backbone of the information age. Three-quarters of their capacity was devoted to the World Wide Web. Project Oxygen linked 175 countries in a kind of global super Internet. Another system bundled eight optical fibres to give a transmission capacity of 3.2 terabits per second, the equivalent of 48 million simultaneous phone conversations. The delicate glass fibres on the ocean bed had long since supplanted satellite technology.

Today the cloud is the central metaphor of the internet: a global system of great power and energy that nevertheless retains the aura of something noumenal and numnious, something almost impossible to grasp. We connect to the cloud; we work in it; we store and retrieve stuff from it; we think through it. We pay for it and only notice it when it breaks. It is something we experience all the time without really understanding what it is or how it works. It is something we are training ourselves to rely upon with only the haziest of notions about what is being entrusted, and what it is being entrusted to. Downtime aside, the first criticism of this cloud is that it is a very bad metaphor. The cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible, if you know where to look for it. The cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapor and radio waves, where everything just works. It is a physical infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy and reside within national and legal jurisdictions. The cloud is a new kind of industry, and a hungry one. The cloud doesn't just have a shadow; it has a footprint. Absorbed into the cloud are many of the previously weighty edifices of the civic sphere: the places where we shop, bank, socialize, borrow books, and vote. Thus obscured, they are rendered less visible and less amenable to critique, investigation, preservation and regulation. Another criticism is that this lack of understanding is deliberate. There are good reasons, from national security to corporate secrecy to many kinds of malfeasance, for obscuring what's inside the cloud. What evaporates is agency and ownership: most of your emails, photos, status updates, business documents, library and voting data, health records, credit ratings, likes, memories, experiences, personal preferences, and unspoken desires are in the cloud, on somebody else's infrastructure. There's a reason Google and Facebook like to build data centers in Ireland (low taxes) and Scandinavia (cheap energy and cooling). There's a reason global, supposedly post-colonial empires hold onto bits of disputed territory like Diego Garcia and Cyprus, and it's because the cloud touches down in these places, and their ambiguous status can be exploited. The cloud shapes itself to geographies of power and influence, and it serves to reinforce them. The cloud is a power relationship, and most people are not on top of it. These are valid criticisms, and one way of interrogating the cloud is to look where is shadow falls: to investigate the sites of data centers and undersea cables and see what they tell us about the real disposition of power at work today. We can seed the cloud, condense it, and force it to give up some of its stories. As it fades away, certain secrets may be revealed. By understanding the way the figure of the cloud is used to obscure the real operation of technology, we can start to understand the many ways in which technology itself hides its own agency - through opaque machines and inscrutable code, as well as physical distance and legal constructs. And in turn, we may learn something about the operation of power itself, which was doing this sort of thing long before it had clouds and black boxes in which to hide itself.