HOW IT WORKS
I must mention to you (some of you yet again!) that I have brushed arms and shared beers with guys who I suspect as being some type of spies..like CIA agents or NSA agents or Vietnam’s TC2 agents.
It’s no big deal. I am probably imagining things as usual. But when you get off a plane in Saigon some day and a robust and buffed man walks up and greets you by name, and you’ve never seen him before, and you were expecting no one, and he remains with you every day on every subsequent trip you take into Vietnam, and he meets your plane each time you come in even though you’ve told no one, and he even goes with you, your wife and older sister when you are going on vacation to the beach or the mountain resorts, you begin to think to yourself..hmmm.
I mean and they’ll never admit it. A nice fellow, who played an interesting (to me and my family) role in my life, who has the Instagram handle of Angry Logger, and makes exquisite natural wood furniture, yet flies all over doing something he doesn’t really explain, is an expert photographer, and has spent lots of time in backwater countries, responds to your question “Are you some type of spy”? retorts..”Haha, NO …..but then that’s what I’d say right”?,,. I mean it keeps you thinking.
The CIA recruited one of my international team at Intel, who went to the PRC with me several times in 1984 and 85, to write down and get the business cards of everyone we met and turn them in with a debriefing. Bill Langner is his name and we had gone to China together several times before he mentioned his role to me. One day, about a year into our new relationship with China I had a senior “technologist”, a woman, from Beijing in to visit with us. Bill came into my office and said: “ Jeez Gerry, I just got a call from “Roger Roper” at the (shhh) CIA and he’s pretty upset and excited. He wants to know what the hell we’re doing having (Madame) Yao BangLi (made up name) visit here next week. You know she is the top woman General in the People’s Liberation Army and on the Army General Staff”. Oh well – things like this always seem to be happening.
I actually think I am just playing; doing recreational mental summersaults since I like to get dizzy….
Anyway this is not a story about spies. This is a story about how impressive the internet is and about how a guy named Darrell Owens did the best job EVER explaining and impressing upon Margo and me just how amazing it is. The internet is the work of man – harnessing the most uniquely magical forces and elements we humans have yet to figure out. There have been billions of man hours spent figuring out how to do what the internet does..it goes back to Ben Franklin and Faraday and Marconi and Morse and hosts of people whose names are unfamiliar to we who use it. Perhaps the most unsung are Maurer, Keck, Schultz, and Kao who made fibre optic cables possible and harnessed the speed of light: Patent # 3711262.
I have traveled with Darrell to a number of countries: Vietnam, Ghana, Zambia, other Third World places. Darrell knows as much about the communications infrastructure of emerging countries through out the globe as any man alive. He was current 10 years ago but now he’s retired. He told me once he was locked up in a tin-sheet jail far out in the boondocks of the Congo near Kinsangani or Mbuji-Myal or Kindu or someplace like that – real shitholes. He had been mapping the infrastructure of the phone network. In a continuously heaving country like the DRC, situated with borders on 9 countries, 11th most populous country in the world, and between 5-10 Million citizens killed in civil wars and civil strife just in the last 25 years, you’d want to know what the infrastructure looked like if you had to intervene. The local warlord didn’t like the idea but never-the-less let Darrell go.
In any case Darrell knows how the network infrastructures around the world work. He and I met up at an conference in Livingston, Zambia back in about 2009; I was a keynote speaker and Darryl was leading a workshop. Margo had accompanied me which was not typical for my business trips but she was interested in schools and arts in Third World countries and had done programs in Cambodia, Southern China and Singapore and met with school children all throughout India and Vietnam.
Sun City Resort sits right next to the most beautiful waterfall in all Africa and most say the World – the grand Victoria Falls. Zebra’s munch the grass outside the rooms, walking freely through the beautiful grounds. In 3 minutes you can walk through the forest from your room to the Zambian side falls overlook, standing in the mists and the mighty roar. Locally they are called “Mosi-oa-Tunya” – The Smoke that Thunders!
VICTORIA FALLS
We worked on plans and strategies for bringing more broadband networks to Sub Saharan Africa, meeting with other players and presenting our corporate programs. We went out to some of the schools and met with the kids and teachers.
One evening we took a small aluminum boat on to the “The Mighty Zambezi” river and went out through the many islands looking for game. The boat driver steered the 20 foot runabout right up to the mud bank as we stared up to a 10 fool tall Elephant bull staring down at us- his trunk could touch us.
Margo, Darrell and I were sitting by the pool at lunch a day or so into the conference when Darrell astounded us with the following discussion.
We were sitting there sending a couple of email messages with some information to each other. Just a simple exchange. Margo commented that it’s nice that we could do email in the middle of southern Africa. Darrell said something to the effect that “well these messages have to go all the way to London and back to get to each of us”. Holy lightbulbs! That was very strange.
D. said: “Well here, in sub-saharan Africa, they haven’t yet built the hierarchy of servers to do all the message exchanges for people whose “domains” are outside the local countries”. Hmmm. (remember the domain server is the one that hosts your email like @gmail.com” – that’s the domain.) Turns out, he told us, the email message actually has to go through a lot of places and networks to get to each other. Even though there will only be a few seconds – maybe 5 to 10 between Gerry sending it and Darrell receiving it. In fact he says “ Why, it has to go all the way to London”!!
Well this sounded interesting, and we had a captive expert with not much else to do in that lunch hour by the Sun City Zambia pool.
So after some urging he decided to tell us the answer to the supposedly simple question “When Gerry sitting by the pool, sends an email message to Darrell, over on the other side of Margo, sitting 6 feet away, where does that Gerry Email message go”?
Here is (more or less) what Darrell told us: (Swopian-presnivel: today it doesn’t work like this…servers now installed in Zambia, close to the Sun City, can do it..BUT in 2008 this is how it worked)
Ok first you should know that, in some cases, in fact in the longest “legs” of the journey, which are under the Atlantic Ocean along the West African sea coast, the message is traveling at the SPEED OF LIGHT! Which is very fast indeed. Light travels 186,000 miles in just one second. That means a light message can travel a distance “in one second equal to flying around the circumference of the earth more than SEVEN times”. So that email, that I am sending to Darrell sitting 6 feet from me by the pool in Zambia has to go to London, England and back to get to him.AND: It does! IN LESS THAN 10 SECOND – IN FACT MORE LIKE 2 SECOND! Now ask yourself how does it get to that very fast cable, under the Atlantic Ocean, which starts 1,400 miles south of us in Capetown, South Africa, up to London, and back to us at the hotel?
HERE is how the message travels (more or less):
1. from our laptop by the pool it goes up to the hotel roof where there is a WiFi router – just like at home
2. then the message goes a foot by a small cable to a Microwave dish antenna on the hotel roof
3. then it goes by a Microwave signal 15 miles through the air to the Livingston Post office
4. then by a copper cable to the town of Kasungu, Zambia
5. By Microwave across the Zambezi River to the town of Kasane, in Botswana (by Chobe Game Reserve)
6. by Fiber Optic Cable (“Fiber”) to the capital of Botswana, Gabarone
7. By copper cable to Johannesburg (JoBurg) South Africa
8. By Fiber down to Capetown where it intersected, in 2008, the SAT-3 Undersea Fiber Optic Cable
9. Then by the Fiber SAT-3 8000 miles to Senegal and on to Sesimbra, Portugal.
10. At Portugal it switches to another undersea cable to Brean or Goonhilly, England
11. then on to London where Gerry’s message essentially says: “How do I get to Darrell Owens”.
So it lines up and then gets smartly processed by an enormous pile of enormous “masses” of FLOPS which, “said mass” figures out where Darryl’s notebook is.If “said mass” were sentient it would say something like: “Oh Me Gosh – Darryl’s pretty much sitting right next to Gerry”
In fact the “mass” can pretty much figure out where anyone is who happens to be connected to a mail server anywhere in a fraction of a second.
So there is my email sitting in London.
THEN the “mass” takes the message and, wouldn’t you know, sends it back:
London to Bream
to Sisimbrato
to Senegal
and then Capetown
to JoBurg
to Gabarone
to Kasane
to Kasungato
to Livingstone Post Office
to the Sun City Hotel roof
down through the WiFi Ether
and in less than 5-10 seconds tells Darrell: “You Got Mail” from Gerry Greeve
So That’s about the end of my tale.
My email went close to 10,000 miles each way – 20,000 miles in 5 seconds. Down to CapeTown up to London and back again.It went the largest distance under the Atlantic via the SAT-3 Fiber Optic Cable about 8000 mile each way. In that portion it traveled pretty close to the speed of light.
Also those of you who like to get a little bit geeky understand that all along the way that email signal is processed through innumerable little machines, clusters of servers, parts of specialized computers and radio signal generators, ampifiers, and receivers. The signal gets checked and re-amplified every 60-70 kilometers under the sea, that’s about every 40 miles. So there are about 400 machines that touch the signal just under the sea. Each signal has code to make sure it is being transmitted and passed on accurately and unchanged. And to fix it if it gets tangled up. It’s normal for the message to be split into little parts, sent over separate stands of fiber and then reassembled – dozens or hundreds of times. I am sure there are another couple of hundred machines massaging the message as it passes through all the nodes on land. The message probably gets touched by several thousand electronic digital and analog devices. A ton of stuff going on in those 5-10 seconds.
By the way, man’s use of undersea cables to transmit electric messages goes back quite a ways. On 27 December 1879, South Africa was directly connected with Europe via Durban and Zanzibar to Aden by means of the East Coast cable of the South African Telegraph Company. This was a single-channel cable. The first undersea cable was a Trans-Atlantic one from Ireland to Newfoundland in 1850, well before the American Civil War. But it took another 15 year to get a reliable one operating but when it did it cut the time to pass a message from Europe to the New World “from two weeks to two minutes”.
Now it is two seconds!
By the way the pictures in this post are from Darrell. Thank you my friend for all you’ve taught me as well as a number of very interesting excursions.
That’s all folks!
gerrythetravelhund 