mixed digital and physical infrastructures

27th St at South St., PHL.  AT&T fiber optic cables, USPS mailbox, a fire hydrant.  Across the street is a fortress-style AT&T building. 

Digital communications moving through AT&T's fiber optic cables that emerge from beneath the street at this point, physical communication in the form of mail can be deposited in the mailbox directly adjacent, and if there is a fire, the hydrant accesses Philadelphia's water supply as well.  This is a pretty useful example of the mixing of physical and digital elements in the urban landscape, in this case on the sidewalk in center city Philadelphia.

wires, towers, trash, and snow

There are plenty of infrastructural networks visible in this scene, and little aesthetic consideration for any of the systems. Cellular phone tower, electrical power lines, a dumpster, a motel, and plenty of asphalt for driving on. Shelbyville, Kentucky.

power lines, Tilden Park

Berkeley Hills.

corridors

Water, freeway, electrical power, probably a cellular phone tower or two as well.  The Schuylkill River from the South Street Bridge, Philadelphia.

outside looking in

The Quonix data center at 24th and Locust St. in Philadelphia. 

inclusion/exclusion in the city

 
From the chapter "Neobourgeois Space": 

What novelists like Perec, Beauvoir, and Rochefort -- no less than the Situationists performing their urban experiments in Paris during the same years, or Henri Lefebvre progressively recoding his initial concept of "everyday life" into a range of spatial and urban categories -- realized, was the emergence of a new image of society as a city -- and thus the beginning of a whole new thematics of inside and outside, of inclusion in, and exclusion from, a positively valued modernity.  Cities possess a center and banlieues, and citizens, those on the interior, deciding who among the insiders should be expelled, and whether or not to open their doors to those on the outside. -- Kristin Ross, from Fast Cars, Clean Bodies p. 149 - 150

What interests me about Ross's point, in the context of mobile connectivity and infrastructure, is how this inclusion/exclusion is reinforced through access to communication technologies.  The ease of wayfinding through a mapping app on a smart phone is only useful if you can access the phone and afford the data plan.  Is access to a smart phone a new inclusion into "positively valued modernity"?  And how is this access opened to outsiders?  The urban spaces have not changed much due to mobile connectivity, but the utility they spaces hold changes through on-the-go access to the Internet, for instance, through a smart phone.  Perhaps mobile and urban technologies can become more open and inclusive -- here is an example of public usb drives installed in New York City -- but, most likely, inclusion in urban society will necessitate leaving the phone in the pocket, inhabiting the physical city and not the cyber-city, and spending more time on the streets, on foot.

the invisible city

One Wilshire in downtown Los Angeles, a prominent colocation point on the west coast/eastern shore of the Pacific Ocean for global telecommunication providers. photo by Xeni Jardin, via flickr source

Kazys Varnelis's work, especially The Infrastructural City:  Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, is extremely useful for conceptualizing the space of telecommunications.  In looking over his essay on One Wilshire in The Infrastructural City again, I found this quote:

If the [Disney] Concert Hall represents late capitalism's obsession with the visual, One Wilshire represents the rise of invisible networks and unmappable forces in our lives.  The invisible city that grows from telecommunications is, by and large, a privatized infrastructure, its possession by private forces making it impossible to map.  Although the postmodern hyper-space of the Bonaventure [Hotel] is unmappable by the body, a legible floor plan can still be found.  No such plan exists for networked capital.  Diagrams of the Internet and of fiber optic lines are hard to find: the data is proprietary, a matter too important for corporations to allow free access.  Moreover, the complexity emerging along with the massive proliferation of connections increasingly makes it hard for even corporations owning the networks to understand their dimensions.  A floor plan of One Wilshire tells you little about what happens there.  Even for the corporate hive mind, the map is exceeded by a hypercomplex reality.  The space of global technological flows does not desire to become visual or apparent:  perhaps only some spray-paint [on asphalt] or a flag in the ground marks the presence of fiber below, and sometimes even that is elusive.  (pages 128-129)

Increasingly, conceptualizing the spaces of this invisible city require searching through pages upon pages of planning documents unearthed on the websites of municipalities to infer where a fiber-optic cable is run underground and which global corporation is putting it there.  This research is done more through identifying the spaces where conditions come together than by identifying the direct points or locations of the telecom infrastructures.

Telecommunication networking equipment inside One Wilshire. photo by Xeni Jardin, via flickr source 

live, global locations of cableships

The locations of the world's submarine fiber optic repair ships, 25 October 2010.  Source

The global flows of digital information require submarine fiber optic linkages between continents.  Since these cables are laid atop or just below the surface of the ocean floor, they are susceptible to being damaged by a number of sources, but primarily by fishing vessels dragging a net or anchor.  Consequently, a fleet of cable repair ships sit ready in most major ports worldwide to mend a break.  The 'x' is a sitting ship, and the triangles indicate moving ones.  One could deduce most important cable routes as well as the places with regular problems by the clustering of 'x's and triangles.  The English Channel, the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Oman, the Gulf of Aden, and the East China Sea.  If a cable becomes damaged in a location without a cableship nearby, as happened to east Africa's Seacom cable in late July, the ICT linkages could be down for a while.  Looking at this map, it seems that if a cable goes out in much of the Southern Hemisphere, unless a redundant link is in place, the affected regions could be without telecommunication linkages for a length of time, until a cableship is able to motor south to fix the outage.

submarine fiber optic cables attacked by sharks

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In the 1980s AT&T was prototyping submarine telecom cable by laying they between the Canary Islands, where the cables were attacked by crocodile sharks

Buried in the final section of a Rand Corporation study into the feasibility of a new platform for deep-sea submarines, is a chapter about the history of submarine cable infrastructure.  In an otherwise dry paragraph about the dangers from dragged anchors and the like that submarine cables face on the ocean floor, was this sentence:

"Between 1985 and 1987, AT&T found that its first deep-sea submarine fiber optic cable (laid between the Canary Islands, Grand Canaria and Tenerife) suffered periodic outages because of frequent attacks of the Pseudocarcharias kamoharai, or crocodile shark, on the cables."

The crocodile shark.  Source

A footnote goes on to explain that "The electric fields of which, it was thought, duplicated that of the shark’s prey under attack."*

I find this fascinating, and slightly amusing, that the globally networked fiber-optic communication system could be damaged enough to cut out by a shark attacking the cable.  Information and communication technologies exist as physical abstractions, of data flows between New York and London's financial centers that dictate the rise or fall of the day's stock trades, and out of nowhere the infrastructure could fail because of a hungry and/or angry shark, at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

*source: Martin, Rick, “Life History and Behavior of Lamnoid Sharks,” from ReefQuest Expeditions, 2001.

corn fields and fiber optics in the Midwest

Fiber optic line markers alongside Highway 24 west of Eureka, Il.

To the west of Eureka, Illinois, on Highway 24, runs a fiber optic cable, in the non-space space of the highway border, between the asphalt and a cornfield.  When you drive into Eureka and turn south on 117, the fiber optic line continues through the residential area.

Stop sign, street sign, and fiber optic cable route marker.  Eureka, IL

Buried gas, sewer, electric, and communication infrastructure, and the overhead electrical lines.  Eureka, IL

What caught my eye and why I stopped to take these photographs, was this scene above, where it appears some digging was scheduled in the near future.  The spray paint and mini flags signify all the different buried infrastructure lines.  What seemed somewhat unique here was that the flags had the company's name on it.  Orange for communication, red for electricity, yellow for gas, green for sewers.  This is an instance of invisible,  underground systems poking through to the surface, if only for a short time.

A close up of these utility flags -- gas and fiber optic lines.  Eureka, IL