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Hotel California for the Internet by Mark Allen
In the words of one Homer Simpson: “They have the internet on computers now?” That is certainly the experience most of us have had with the World Wide Web. The internet is something you access with a computer – that web site you check every day, that podcast you just downloaded, the list goes on and on. You no doubt have heard all of this described as the “information superhighway”.
The internet is more than this however; it is also a physical thing – a global network of cables, switches and other infrastructure. All of this infrastructure comes together in centers such as One Wilshire, a building in downtown L.A.
If we run with the analogy of the internet as a highway, then One Wilshire would be a popular hotel; an oasis along the way. This 30 story building once housed nothing but the offices of legal firms.
We have been told that the majority of the building (23 of its 30 floors, in fact) are now geared towards housing the infrastructure of the web rather than office workers.
In the world of IT, a site such as One Wilshire is caller a “carrier hotel”. The hardware for almost 300 telecom and internet companies from all over the world reside in this location, including AT&T and Google, along with telecom and internet carriers from Europe and Asia.
These carrier hotels have made interlinks between these far-flung networks much easier; when they are all under one roof, it is a much simpler matter to connect the two.
In the event of a disaster, this connectivity can save a lot of trouble. The earthquake which stuck Taiwan in December of 2006 severed some fiber optic cables laid underneath the ocean. This meant that a lot of Taiwan’s international communications were disrupted.
It took quite some time to repair these undersea cables. However, thanks to centers like One Wilshire, much of this traffic could be rerouted and thus restore connectivity to Taiwan in a matter of days.
It has been speculated that this very versatility which allows the internet to cope with disaster may make communication centers like One Wilshire prime targets for terrorists. Could this be the case? Also, what would happen if an earthquake or other natural disaster was to disable this crucial communications hub?
Bruce Schneier, author of the book Beyond Fear says that there is indeed a need to make hubs like One Wilshire secure from terrorist attack and natural catastrophes, but believes that the internet’s global reach will make it resilient enough to survive having a node like one Wishire out of commission for a time.
“What the Taiwan earthquake taught us is that the internet actually works” says Schneier. “One thing the internet was designed to survive is the physical failure of nodes. The loss of nodes was supposed to not affect the Net, or at least affect it in a graceful way. And that's exactly what happened.”
At One Wilshire and internet nodes like it, business is steadily growing. The growing use of the internet to convey video and other high volume data is bringing more and more companies to this carrier hotel. A floor which until recently was home to a law firm has been stripped to the walls to make room for its new occupants – routers, switches and cables. These new tenants will continue the work of moving information around the world at light speed.
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