How is the infrastructure of the Internet

Oh, and here you are. Quickly turned out, right? Just click or click on the screen and, if you have a 21st century connection, you are instantly on this page.

But how does this work? Have you ever thought about how a picture with a cat gets on your computer in London from a server in Oregon? We’re not just talking about the wonders of TCP / IP or the ubiquitous Wi-Fi access points, although this is also important. No, we are talking about a large infrastructure: huge submarine cables, extensive data centers with all their excess energy systems and giant, labyrinth-like networks that directly connect billions of people to the Internet.
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But what is probably more important: as we increasingly rely on the ubiquitous connection to the Internet, the number of connected devices is growing, and our thirst for traffic knows no bounds. How do we make the Internet work? How do Verizon and Virgin (the largest Internet service providers in the United States - note New York) manage to consistently transfer one hundred million bytes of data to your home every second, day and night, every day?

Well, after reading the next seven thousand words, you will know about it.

Secret cable exit points on land

British Telecom (BT) can lure customers, promising to carry out "fiber to every home" (FTTH) to increase speed, and Virgin Media has good service quality - speeds up to 200 Mbps for individuals thanks to a hybrid fiber-coaxial (GVK) network . But, as the name implies, the world wide web is truly a global network. To ensure the work of the Internet is beyond the power of a single provider on our island, and indeed anywhere else in the world.

First of all, for once we look at one of the most unusual and interesting cables, through which data is transmitted, and how it reaches the British shores. We are not talking about any ordinary wires between ground-based data centers a hundred kilometers from each other, but about a contact station in a mysterious place on the west coast of England, where the Tata Atlantic submarine cable ends up following the 6,500-kilometer route from American New Jersey.

Communication with the United States is necessary for any serious international communications company, and the Tata's Global Network (TGN) is the only single-owner fiber-optic network around the planet. It is 700 thousand kilometers of submarine and land cables with more than 400 communication centers around the world.

Tata, however, is ready to share. It does not exist simply for the children of the director to play Call of Duty without delay, and the group of the elect could watch the Game of Thrones online without delay. Every second, Tata of the first level accounts for 24% of the global Internet traffic, so the chance to get closer to TGN-A (Atlantic), TGN-WER (Western Europe) and their cable friends cannot be lost.

The station itself - quite a classic data center in appearance, gray and inconspicuous - may in general seem like a place where, for example, cabbage is grown. But inside everything is different: to move around the building, you need RFID-cards, to enter the data center premises - to give your fingerprint to read, but first - a cup of tea and a conversation in the conference room. This is not the usual data center, and some things need to be explained. In particular, underwater cable systems need a lot of energy, which is provided by numerous backup units.

Protected Submarine Cables

Karl Osborne, Tata's vice president of international network development, joined us for the duration of the tour to express his thoughts. Prior to Tata, Osborne worked on the ship itself, laying the cable, and followed the process. He showed us samples of submarine cables, showing how their design changes with depth. The closer you are to the surface, the more you need a protective shell to withstand potential damage from shipping. Trenches are dug in shallow water where cables are laid. However, at a greater depth, as in the West European hollow with a depth of almost five and a half kilometers, protection is not required - commercial shipping does not threaten the cables at the bottom.



At this depth, the cable diameter is only 17 mm; it is like a felt-tip pen in a thick insulating polyethylene sheath. Copper conductor surrounds a variety of steel wires that protect the fiber core in a steel tube with a diameter of less than three millimeters in a soft thixotropic jelly. The protected cables inside are arranged in the same way, but in addition they are dressed in one or more layers of galvanized steel wiring wrapped around the entire cable.

Without copper conductor there would be no submarine cable. Fiber-optic technology has a high speed and can pass almost unlimited amount of data, but fiber can not work at long distances without a little help. To enhance the light transmission along the entire length of the fiber optic cable, repeater devices are needed - in fact, signal amplifiers. On land, this is easily done at the expense of local electricity, but at the bottom of the ocean, amplifiers receive direct current from the copper conductor cable. And where does this current come from? From stations at both ends of the cable.

Although consumers do not know this, the TGN-A is, in fact, two cables that go across the ocean in different ways. If one is damaged, the other will ensure continuity of communication. The alternative TGN-A goes to land at a distance of 110 kilometers (and three ground amplifiers) from the main one and receives its energy from the same place. One of these transatlantic cables has 148 amplifiers, and the other, longer, has 149.

Station leaders try to avoid fame, so I’ll call our station guide John. John explains the system design:

“To power the cable from our end, there is a positive voltage, and in New Jersey it is negative. We try to maintain current: the voltage can easily stumble on the resistance on the cable. Voltage approximately 9 thousand volts divided between the two ends. This is called bipolar nutrition. So from each end about 4 500 volts. Under normal conditions, we could ensure the operation of the entire cable without any assistance from the United States. ”

Needless to say, the amplifiers are made with the expectation of uninterrupted operation for 25 years, since no one will send divers to the bottom to change the contact. But looking at the cable sample itself, within which there are only eight optical fibers, it is impossible not to think that with all these efforts there must be something more.

“Everything is limited by the size of the amplifiers. Eight fiber pairs require amplifiers that are twice as large, ”explains John. And the more amplifiers, the more energy is needed.

At the station, the eight wires that make up the TGN-A form four pairs, each of which contains a receive fiber and a transmission fiber. Each posting is painted in its own color so that in the event of a breakdown and the need for repair in the sea, technicians can figure out how to collect everything in its original state. Similarly, workers on land can understand what to insert when connecting to an underwater line terminal (SLTE).

Repair of cables in the sea

After a tour of the station, I talked with Peter Jameson, a fiber optic network tech support specialist at Virgin Media, to learn more about how the submarine cables work.

“As soon as the cable was found and delivered to the ship for repair, a new piece of intact cable was installed. Then the device with remote control returns to the bottom, finds the other end of the cable and makes the connection. Then the cable is buried in the bottom with a maximum of one and a half meters using a high-pressure water jet, ”he says.

“Usually the repair takes about ten days from the moment the repair ship departs, of which four or five days are working directly at the site of the breakdown. Fortunately, such cases are rare: in the past seven years, Virgin Media faced only two. ”

QAM, DWDM, QPSK ...

When cables and amplifiers are installed — most likely for decades — nothing more can be adjusted in the ocean. The bandwidth, the delay and all that concerns the quality of services is regulated at the stations.

“To understand the signal being sent, forward error correction is used, and the modulation techniques change as the amount of traffic transmitted by the signal increases,” says Osborne. “QPSK (quadrature phase shift keying) and BPSK (binary phase shift keying), sometimes called PRK (two times relative phase shift keying), or 2PSK are modulation techniques at long distances. 16QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) would be used in shorter submarine cable systems, and now 8QAM technology is being developed, intermediate between 16QAM and BPSK.

The DWDM technology (dense wavelength division multiplexing) is used to combine different data channels and to transmit these signals at different frequencies — through light in a specific color spectrum — over a fiber-optic cable. In fact, it forms a multitude of virtual fiber channels. Due to this fiber throughput increases dramatically.

Today, each of the four pairs has a capacity of 10 Tbps and can reach 40 Tbps per TGN-A cable. At that time, the 8 Tbps figure was the maximum existing potential on this Tata network cable. As new users begin to use the system, they use reserve capacity, however, we will not be impoverished: the system still has 80% of potential, and in subsequent years, with the help of regular new coding or multiplexing gain, it will almost certainly be possible to increase bandwidth.

One of the main problems affecting the use of photon communication lines is dispersion in optical fiber. This is the name of what developers include in the design of cable creation, since some sections of the optical fiber have a positive dispersion, and some - negative. And if you need to make repairs, you need to be sure that you have a cable with the right type of dispersion. On land, electronic dispersion compensation is a task that is constantly optimized to allow the transmission of the weakest signals.

“We used to use fiber optic coils to induce dispersion compensation,” says John, “but now this is all done electronically. So much more precisely, it is possible to increase throughput ”.

So now, instead of initially offering users 1-, 10- or 40-gigabit optical fiber, thanks to technologies improved in recent years, it is possible to prepare “dumps” of 100 gigabits.

Cable masking

Despite the fact that due to the bright yellow sheath, it is difficult not to notice them, at first glance, in the building both the Atlantic and East European submarine cables can be easily mistaken for some elements of the power distribution system. They are installed on the wall and there is no need to mess around with them, although in case new optical cable laying is required, they will be directly connected by means of an underwater optical fiber from the shield. On the red and black stickers sticking out of the floor in the bookmark, it says “TGN Atlantic Fiber”; on the right is a TGN-WER cable, equipped with another device, in which fiber pairs are located separately from each other in a junction box.

To the left of both boxes are power cables enclosed in metal pipes. The two most durable ones are for the TGN-A, the two that are thinner for the TGN-WER. The latter also has two submarine cable routes, one of which ends in the Spanish city of Bilbao, and the other in the Portuguese capital, Lisbon. Since the distance from these two countries to the UK is shorter, in this case much less energy is required, and therefore thinner cables are used.



Speaking about the device location of the laying of cables, Osborne says:

“Those cables that stretch from the beach have three main parts: the fiber used for the traffic, the power line and the ground connection. Optical fiber through which the traffic goes is that which is stretched out over that box. The line of force branches off in another segment within the territory of this object ”

Overhead, a yellow fiber trough crawls to distribution panels that will perform a variety of tasks, including the demultiplexing of incoming signals, so that different frequency ranges can be separated. They represent a place of potential "losses", where individual channels can terminate without getting into the terrestrial network.
John says: "100 Gbps channels are coming in, and you have 10 Gigabit clients: 10 to 10. We also offer clients a clean 100 Gbps."

“It all depends on the wishes of the client,” adds Osborne. “If they need a single channel of 100 Gbps, which comes from one of the shields, it can be directly provided to the consumer. If the client needs something slower, then yes, you will have to deliver traffic to other equipment, where it can be divided into parts with lower speed. We have customers who buy a dedicated line at a speed of 100 Gbps, but there are not so many of them. Any small provider who wants to buy from us the opportunity to transfer, rather choose the line to 10 Gbit. "

Submarine cables provide multiple gigabit of bandwidth that can be used for leased lines between two company offices, so that, for example, voice calls can be made. All bandwidth can be expanded to the service level of the Internet backbone. And each of these platforms is equipped with a different separately controlled equipment.

“The bulk of the bandwidth that comes from the cable is either used to operate our own Internet, or is sold as transmission lines to other wholesale internet companies, like BT, Verizon, and other international operators that do not have their own cables on the seabed and therefore buy access to transfer information from us. "



High distribution boards ensure the functioning of a hub of optical cables that share 10-gigabit connectivity with customers. If you want to increase throughput, it’s almost as easy as ordering additional modules and shoving them on shelves - as the industry says, when they want to describe how large rack arrays are arranged.

John points to the existing and used by the client system 560 Gbit / s (based on 40G technology), which has recently been updated with an additional 1.6 Tbit / s. Additional power was achieved with the help of two additional modules of 800 Gbit / s, which operate on the basis of 100G technology with traffic of more than 2.1 Tbit / s. When he talks about the task, it seems that the longest phase of the process is the expectation of new modules.

All Tata infrastructure facilities have copies, so there are two rooms, SLT1 and SLT2. One Atlantic system, which received the internal name S1, is to the left of SLT1, and the cable Eastern Europe - Portugal is called C1, and it is located to the right. On the other side of the building are the SLT2 and the Atlantic S2, which together with C2 are connected to Spain.

In a separate compartment is located near the ground room, in which, among other things, are engaged in monitoring the flow of traffic to the London data center Tata. One of the transatlantic pairs of optical fiber actually resets data out of place. This is an “extra pair” that continues right up to the Tata office in London from New Jersey to minimize signal delay. By the way, about her: John checked the data on the delay of the signal going through two Atlantic cables; the shortest path reaches the packet data rate (PGD) at 66.5 ms, while the longest - 66.9 ms. So your information is transferred at a speed of about 703,759,397.7 km / h. Well, fast enough?

He describes the main problems arising in connection with this: “Every time when we switch from optical to low-voltage cable, and then again to optical, the delay time increases. Now, using high-quality optics and more powerful amplifiers, the need to reproduce the signal is minimized. Other factors include a limit on the level of power that can be sent over submarine cables. Crossing the Atlantic, the signal remains optical throughout the journey. "

Testing Submarine Cables

On the one hand, there is a surface on which the testing equipment lies, and since, as they say, the eyes are the best witness, one of the technicians immerses the fiber optic cable into the EXFO FTB-500. It is equipped with a FTB-5240S spectral analysis module. The EXFO device itself runs on the Windows XP Pro Embedded platform and is equipped with a touch screen. It restarts to show installed modules. After that, you can select one of them and run an available diagnostic procedure.

“You just take 10% of the luminous flux from this cable system,” explains the technician. “You are creating an access point for a spectral analysis device, so you can then return this 10% back to analyze the signal.”



We are looking at the highways that extend to London, and since this segment is at the height of the decommissioning process, we can see that there is an unused area on it that appears on the display. The device cannot determine in more detail how much information or a particular frequency is involved; to find out, you have to watch the frequency in the database.

“If you look at the underwater system,” he adds, “there are also plenty of sidebands and all sorts of other things, so you can see how the device works. But at the same time you know that there is a confusion of instrument readings. And you can see if it is moving to a different frequency band, which lowers the efficiency of operation.



Having never left the ranks of the heavyweights of information transfer systems, the Juniper MX960 Universal Router acts as the core of IP telephony. In fact, as John confirms, the company has two of them: “We will soon be brought all sorts of things from overseas, and then we will be able to launch STM-1 [Level 1 Synchronous Transport Module], GigE, or 10GigE clients - this will perform a kind of multiplexing and will provide various consumers with IP networks. ”

The equipment used on terrestrial DWDM platforms takes up much less space than an underwater cable system. It seems that the ADVA FSP 3000 equipment is practically the same as the Ciena 6500 kit, however, since it is installed on land, the quality of the electronics should not be high. In fact, the used shelves of the ADVA are simply cheaper versions, since it works at shorter distances. In systems of submarine cables there is such a ratio: the further you send the information, the more noise appears, therefore dependence on the photon systems of Ciena, which are installed in the place of cable laying, to compensate for these noises, grows.

One of the telecommunications racks contains three separate DWDM systems. Two of them are connected to the London center by separate cables (each of which passes through three amplifiers), and the rest leads to the information processing center located in Buckinghamshire.

Cable laying space is also provided by the West African Cable System (WACS) section. It was built by a consortium of about a dozen telecommunications companies and goes all the way to Cape Town. Underwater branching units help to divide the cable and bring it to the surface in various places on the coast of the African South Atlantic.

Nightmare energy

You cannot visit the place where the cable was laid or the data processing center and do not notice how much energy is needed there: not only for equipment in the telecommunications racks, but also for coolers - systems that prevent servers and switches from overheating. And since the place where the submarine cable was laid has unusual energy requirements due to its underwater repeaters, the backup systems are also not very ordinary.

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Since we are talking about the international cable system, communication providers around the world face the same problems: this is, in particular, damage to ground cables, which most often occurs on construction sites in areas that are less closely controlled. These are, of course, the anchors at the bottom of the sea that have strayed from the path. In addition, we must not forget about DDoS attacks, during which systems are attacked, and all available bandwidth fills the traffic. Of course, the team is well equipped to counter these threats.



“The equipment is set up to track normal traffic patterns that are expected in a specific period of the day. They can consistently verify traffic at 4 pm past Thursday and now. If the scan reveals anything unusual, the equipment can proactively eliminate the intrusion and redirect traffic through another firewall, which can weed out any intrusion. This is called productive DDoS mitigation. His other appearance is retaliatory. In this case, the consumer can tell us: “Oh, I have a threat in the system on this day. You'd better be alert. "Even in such a situation, we can filter as a proactive measure. There is also legitimate activity that Glastonbury will notify us of, for example, New York Music Festival, so when tickets go on sale, the increased activity level is not blocked. "

Delays in the system also have to be proactively monitored because of customers like Citrix, which are engaged in virtualization services and cloud applications that are sensitive to significant network delays. Such a client as Formula-1 appreciates the thirst for speed. Tata Communications manages the racing network infrastructure for all teams and various broadcasters.

“We are responsible for the entire ecosystem of Formula 1, including race engineers located at the venue and also part of the team. We create an entry point at each venue of the race - we install it, stretch all cables and provide all users. We set up different Wi-Fi hotspots for guest zone and other places. The engineer who is there does all the work, and he can demonstrate that on the day of the race, all communication is in working condition. We monitor it with the help of PRTG (Paessler Traffic Traffic Grapher - a program designed to monitor network usage - approx. New), so that we can check the status of key performance indicators. We provide support from here, day and night and seven days a week.

Such an active client, who regularly conducts events throughout the year, means that the site management team must set test dates for backup systems. If we are talking about the week of the F1 race, then from Tuesday to Monday of the next week these guys will have to keep their hands to themselves and not start testing the lines in the information processing center. Even during my tour, which Paul conducted, he was careful and, pointing to the equipment for the F1 unit, did not open the dashboard so that I could examine it in more detail.









And, by the way, if you are curious how the backup systems work, then they have 360 ​​batteries installed on each UPS and 8 uninterruptible power supplies. In total, this gives more than 2800 batteries, and since each of them weighs 32 kg, their total weight is about 96 tons. Battery life is 10 years, and each of them is individually controlled temperature, humidity, resistance and other indicators, checked around the clock. When fully loaded, they will be able to support the work of the information processing center for about 8 minutes, which will give a lot of time for the generators to turn on. On the day of my visit, the load was such that the batteries, if they turned on, would be able to ensure the operation of all the systems of the center for a couple of hours.

In the center there are 6 generators installed - three for each hall of the data center. Each generator can take full load of the center - 1.6 MVA. Each of them produces 1280 kilowatts of energy. In general, 6 MVA comes in there - this amount of energy would probably be enough to provide half of the city with energy. In the center there is the seventh generator, which covers the need for energy needed to maintain the building. There are about 8,000 liters of fuel in the room - enough to perfectly survive the day under full load conditions. With complete combustion of fuel per hour, 220 liters of diesel are consumed, which, if it were a car moving at 96 km / h, could bring a modest figure of 235 liters per 100 km to a new level - the numbers that make Humvee look like like a prius.

Last mile

The final stage - the last few kilometers from the network gateway or network control center to your home - is not so impressive, even if you look briefly at the final branches of the network infrastructure.

However, there have been changes. Installing new telecommunications cabinets side by side with old green cabinets, Virgin Media and Openreach are organizing DOCSIS and VDSL2 lines, increasing the number of homes and businesses connected to the network.

VDSL2

Inside the Openreach cabinets for VDSL2 lines is the DSLAM multiplexer (digital subscriber line access multiplexer in BT terminology). In the days of ADSL and ADSL2 technologies, DSLAM multiplexers were installed close to local switches, but the use of outdoor cabinets allows you to amplify the signal of an optical cable going to the switch in order to increase the speed of broadband access for the end user.

DSLAM cabinets are powered separately and connected by connecting pairs to existing outdoor cabinets, such a bundle is a hub telecommunications cabinet. The copper pair to the end user remains intact, while the VDSL2 allows broadband access through the use of conventional outdoor cabinets.



This is an upgrade that cannot be implemented without the presence of technicians, and the NTE5 panel (network terminal equipment) inside the house must also be modified. But still, this is a step forward, which allows providers to increase the speed from 38 Mbit / s to 78 Mbit / s in millions of homes, bypassing the amount of work required to lay FTTH.

DOCSIS

This is a completely different technology of Virgin Media hybrid optical-coaxial network, which allows home consumers up to 200 Mbit / s and up to 300 Mbit / s for enterprises. Despite the fact that the technology to ensure such speed is based on DOCSIS 3 (the standard for data transmission over coaxial cable), and not on VDSL2, there are some parallels. Virgin Media runs fiber-optic lines to outdoor cabinets, then using copper coaxial cable for broadband access and TV (twisted pair is still used for telephony).

It is worth noting that DOCSIS 3.0 is the most common last mile variant in the USA, 55 million of all 90 million fixed broadband access lines use coaxial cable. ADSL is in second place - 20 million, followed by FTTP - 10 million. VDSL2 technology in the United States is almost never used, but is occasionally found in some urban areas.

DOCSIS 3 still has a reserve of speed, which will allow cable providers, if necessary, to increase the speed to 400, 500 or 600 Mbit / s - and after that DOCSIS 3.1 will appear, which is already waiting in the wings.

When using the DOCSIS 3.1 standard, the incoming speed exceeds 10 Gbit / s, and the outgoing speed reaches 1 Gbit / s. It is possible to achieve such power due to the quadrature amplitude modulation method - it is also used at short distances in submarine cables. However, on land, higher order CAMs were obtained — 4096 CAM according to the digital modulation scheme of multiplexing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), where, as in DWDM, the signal is divided into several subcarriers transmitted at different frequencies in a limited spectrum. The ODFM method is also used in ADSL / VDSL and G.fast.

Last 100 meters

Although the last few years FTTC and DOCSIS have dominated the UK wired Internet access market, it will be a big omission not to mention the other side of the last mile problem (or the last 100 meters): mobile devices and wireless.

Soon, new features are expected to emerge for managing and deploying mobile networks, but for now let's just take a look at Wi-Fi, which is basically an extension for FTTC and DOCSIS. A good example: the recently introduced and almost complete coverage of urban areas with Wi-Fi access points.

At first, there were only a few bold cafes and bars, but then BT turned subscriber routers into open access points, calling it “BT Fon”. Now it has become a game of large infrastructure companies - a Wi-Fi network in the London Underground or an interesting Virgin project “smart sidewalk” in Chesham, Buckinghamshire

For this project, Virgin Media simply placed the access points under the manhole covers, which are made of a special radiotransparent composite. Virgin use many lines and nodes throughout Britain, so why not add a few Wi-Fi points to share access with people?



In a conversation with Simon Clement, a senior technologist at Virgin Media, it seems that introducing a smart sidewalk at first seemed like a more difficult task than it actually happened.

“Previously, we encountered difficulties in working with local authorities, but this time it didn’t happen,” says Clement, “Chesham’s city council actively collaborated with us on this project, and the general impression was that officials were open to the introduction of communication services for the population and understand what work needs to be done to realize these services "

Most difficulties arise on their own or related to regulations.

“The main task is to think outside the box. For example, standard projects of wireless access assume installation of radio points as high as administrative regulations allow, and these points operate with power, the maximum level of which is limited by the same regulations. We tried to install access points under the ground, so that they worked on the power of a simple home Wi-Fi »

“We had to take many risks in the course of the project. As in all innovation projects, a preliminary risk assessment is relevant as long as the scope of work remains unchanged. In practice, this happens extremely rarely, and we have to regularly perform a dynamic risk assessment. There are key principles that we try to stick to, especially when working with wireless access. We always adhere to the limitations of the EIRP standard (effective isotropically radiated power) and always use safe working methods for radio. When dealing with radio, it's better to be a conservative. ”

Back to the future of cable Internet

Next on the horizon for the POTS network from Openreach is G.fast, which can best be described as an FTTdp configuration (optical fiber to the distribution point). Again, this is an adapter from fiber to copper, but the DSLAM will be placed even closer to the end user, above the telegraph poles and underground, and the usual copper twisted pair will be on the last dozen meters of cable.



The idea is to position the fiber as close as possible to the client, while at the same time minimizing the length of the copper cable, which theoretically makes it possible to achieve a connection speed of 500 to 800 Mbps. G.fast operates with a much larger frequency range than VDSL2, so cable length has a greater effect on network performance. However, some doubt that in this situation BT Openreach will optimize speed, because, due to the high cost, to provide such services, they will have to return to the host telecommunications cabinet and sacrifice speed: it will drop to 300 Mbps.

There is still FTTH. Openreach initially postponed FTTH - they developed the best (read: cheap) transmission method, but recently announced their “ambition” to launch a large-scale implementation of FTTH. FTTC or FTTdp technologies are most likely to become a short-term and intermediate solution for many users who use cable providers, who in turn are wholesale customers of Openreach.

On the other hand, there is no reason to believe that Virgin Media is going to rest on coaxial laurels: while their competitor, the telecommunications giant, is considering its moves, Virgin is delivering FTTH services consistently, reaching 250 thousand users and aims to reach 500 thousand this year. The Lightning project, which will bring another four million homes and offices to the Virgin network over the next few years, includes one million new FTTH connections.

In the current situation, Virgin uses RFOG technology and thus it is possible to use standard coaxial routers and TiVo, but significant influence on FTTH in the UK gives the company several additional options in the future when the demand for broadband user access increases.



The past few years have also been favorable for small and independent players like Hyperoptic and Gigaclear, which are releasing their own fiber-optic networks. Their coverage is still extremely limited to a couple of thousand residential buildings in the city center (Hyperoptic) and rural settlements (Gigaclear), but the growth of competition and investment in infrastructure never leads to bad.

That's the story

That's it: next time, while watching a video on YouTube, you will know in detail how it moves from the cloud server to your computer. It may seem very light, especially from your side, but now you know the truth: everything works on deadly cables of 4,000 volts, 96 tons of batteries, thousands of liters of diesel, millions of miles of last-mile cables and with a lot of redundancy.

The system itself will also become more and more insane. For smart homes, wearable electronics and TV with movies on demand will require a greater range, greater reliability and more brains in flasks. Live well in our time.

The team worked on the translation at the Night: Vlada Olshanskaya, Nikita Pinchuk, Alexander Pozdeyev, Georgy Leshkasheli, Olya Kuznetsova and Kirill Kozlovsky.
Edited: Anna Nebolsina, Roman Vshivtsev and Artem Slobodchikov.