The Internet: manhole covers and boxes on poles
The internet has always seemed like black magic to me. I never stood how it worked, but it just…worked. This is especially frustrating when things don’t work and I don’t know why. To this day, I can’t tell the difference between a modem and a router. To be honest, I don’t actually know what they each do.
So it was a great delight to do this week’s scavenger hunt on the physicality of the internet. I started by reading Networks of New York by Ingrid Burrington and watching Peering into Internet Infrastructure with Ingrid Burrington. I found the readings to be insightful and a delight. It helped me to contextualize what the internet actually looked like in real life, just a bunch of wires and tubes. Once I had the foundational understanding of what I was looking for, I read the field guide as noted in this wireless infrastructure scavenger hunt.
Let the hunt begin!
So I start by walking out my door and I am confronted by my first device. Voila, a wireless camera in my hallway that my building uses to monitor who goes in and out of the building. It occurred to me that I had seen it many times before, but never really gave much of a thought about who was on the other side watching us.
Walking down to the first floor of my building, I see that there are cameras on every floor at the same spot. My guess is that it’s the place closest to where the internet cable is in the building, as not all the spots were “optimal” to see what’s going on in the hallway. On my first floor, I also see even more cameras. One pointing out to the front door and one towards the elevator. In my building alone, there are 8 cameras!
Walking out my front door, I start looking on the ground. There weren’t many sidewalk markings of cables that I saw. Probably because my front door borders an upscale restaurant, so they wouldn’t be too keen on have “graffiti” on their sidewalk (even though it’s public property).
However, there were manholes galore! So many manholes! And none in a straight line or some sort of grid. (The compulsive organizer in me cried a little). All of them located in some slapdash manner, dotting the streets.
On the street right in front of me, there were 6 manhole covers, but only one was a telecom cover, which was of Empire City Subway. From the field guide, I read that ECS is used wholly by Verizon, which is not an internet service provider available in the area! Which means that Spectrum must be leasing the space from Verizon. I guess even though we have Spectrum, in some ways we are also paying for Verizon. Yeah…
I also tried to capture some of the street markings on the street next to the manhole covers; however, I kept getting honked at by cars. And after almost being run over by a couple of them, I decided not to risk it.
Next, I took a jaunt around my neighborhood, specifically within a 1 block radius to see what I could find. Again, lots of manhole covers. How have I not noticed this! I have listed all the ones I counted below and what ownership each of the covers indicated they belonged to.
- Con Ed: 14
- Department of Public Works: 3
- Department of Water Service: 1
- Empire City Subway: 4
- Water Sanitation of New York: 12
- New York Sewers: 5
Walking to the main street in my area, I hit the jackpot. Poles! Not only were there multiple traffic signal controllers, but also distributed antenna systems, traffic cameras, and NYPD cameras. There were also a couple of private cameras I saw outside shops, which I didn’t take pictures of because shop owners were already giving me weird looks for taking pictures of cameras.
What I learned from this hunt was that there’s an entire world living beneath our feet, in the form of cables carrying the messages of the internet. I wonder how many love letters were running past my feet as I was doing this scavenger hunt?
