Telecommunication

Reading “The Undersea Network” made me feel shameful that why did I never think about Internet traffic. Maybe because the Internet always connected my devices through a small box that made me think it works with something like phone cables. This book provoked so many questions in my head like what are the Internet network infrastructure using in Iran? Do we have international support for it? How they shaped and changed? Etc.

I learned that Satellites only handle about one percent of Internet traffic across oceans. The other 99 percent travels through a network of just a few hundred cables lying on the ocean floor. The Undersea Network by Nicole Starosielski figuratively brings these cables to the surface.

These subsea routes existed long before the Internet made use of them. Telegraph cables first connected continents in the 1860s, followed by telephone cables in the 1950s, and fiber-optic Internet cables in the 1990s. Developing these initial routes required extensive international collaboration and research, so most new cable networks simply followed the path of established ones.

The book starts with two conceptual chapters that discuss the history of transoceanic communication cables and the narrative tropes through which the cables are understood. The remaining chapters are structured as a “transmission narrative,” each one telling a story about the history of a different kind of node: the literal nodes of the cable station, the pressure points of cable landings, the islands that mediate network traffic, and the ocean environment itself.

Surfing Internet to find what telecommunication really is and how its infrastructures change the face of the world, I came across the article “How Telecommunications Systems Are Transforming Urban Spaces” by Mitchell L. Moss and Anthony M. Townsend. It is an article from the book “Cities in the Telecommunications Age: The Fracturing of Geographies” by Barney Warf.

This article talks about how telecommunications systems could be an alternative to transportation systems and, how they changing the character of activities in different places. Nowadays telecommunication and its infrastructures are inseparable from urban life.

Warf, Barney. Cities in the Telecommunications Age: The Fracturing of Geographies. Psychology Press, 2000.

Moss, Mitchell L., and Anthony M. Townsend. "How telecommunications systems are transforming urban spaces." Cities in the Telecommunications Age: the fracturing of geographies, Routledge, London (2000).

https://www.academia.edu/908902/How_telecommunications_systems_are_transforming_urban_spaces