Bob Dormon - May 26, 2016 12:15 pm UTC
Ah, there you are. That didn't take too long, surely? Just a click or a tap and, if you’ve some 21st century connectivity, you landed on this page in a trice. Heat Resistant Wire Insulation
But how does it work? Have you ever thought about how that cat picture actually gets from a server in Oregon to your PC in London? We’re not simply talking about the wonders of TCP/IP or pervasive Wi-Fi hotspots, though those are vitally important as well. No, we’re talking about the big infrastructure: the huge submarine cables, the vast landing sites and data centres with their massively redundant power systems, and the elephantine, labyrinthine last-mile networks that actually hook billions of us to the Internet.
And perhaps even more importantly, as our reliance on omnipresent connectivity continues to blossom, our connected device numbers swell, and our thirst for bandwidth knows no bounds, how do we keep the Internet running? How do Verizon or Virgin reliably get 100 million bytes of data to your house every second, all day every day?
Well, we’re going to tell you over the next 7,000 words. Table of Contents The secret world of cable landing sites Armoured submarine cables Fixing cables at sea QAM, DWDM, QPSK... The cable guise Testing submarine cables The power of nightmares Next stop: Data centre A change in the data tide The NOC's NOC The ISP's ISP's SLA The last mile VDSL2 DOCSIS The last 100 metres Back to the future of wired Internet Quite a trip
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