Behind the scenes of the Internet...

A couple of weeks ago, I went on a quest with some of the engineers with whom I work.

I'm not an engineer but I love a quest and that's why this little adventure was fun. We went to look for a VHUB, which is a virtual hub site. Here's a technical description of a hub site: Hub sites are way stations on the routing patterns that our bits and bytes take to get over the Intertubes to go from the point of origin to our devices. Typically, a hub site is a physical hut and could be as big as a nondescript building that we pass each day without noticing. But a VHUB is virtual. A piece as small as a shoe box could serve the fiber optics for 20,000 wireline internet customers.(See my post on Data Movers and the Pipes that get our information to us for more details on hubs, pipes and how our Facebook posts, Tweets and Instagram photos get to us.).

But we weren't as interested in the VHUB as we were in the power supply and the transponder and how that power supply talks to the VHUB. It's strange that these contraptions talk to each other, but they share a lot of important information.

A good specimen of the power supply, so we thought, was going to be near Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle. The power supply was supposedly at such and such address. There we went and in a typical downtown building, part residential and part office space, a number of small businesses were tapping away on the keys in the midst of a normal business day, using the bits and bytes that we are powering.

I peered through the fuzzy glass of a closed office door. A pile of cash was laying on the table. I point out this detail of the cash because, in this day and age, when it feels like all of our transactions are taking place in this semi-fictional space, where large quantities of money are literally swept from one account to another over the electronic Intertubes, it seems strange to see cash. It seems strange to imagine these brick and mortar places where cash changes hands. Where cash could occupy an entire table.

I can't remember the last time I paid for something in cash. Here we were doing some maintenance on the Intertubes so that people can sweep large amounts of money to each other electronically, virtually, and there was a pile of cash on the table.

I paused to reflect on this detail of the cash while we waited for Ricardo, who works for the real estate company as a gopher, and he had the keys to the office where the power supply was. 20 minutes later he came from another address downtown and opened an office door for us.

"No, this isn't what we're looking for. It's a box about yay big." We gestured the size and shape of a power supply. "Aha," Ricardo retorted and took us to the basement. To a broom closet, really, in the remote corner of the building. Deep underground. In the bowels of the city. Surrounded by brooms, mops and ancient office equipment, we found the object of our quest. With some fiber optic and coaxial cabling strewn around in random fashion, we found our power supply in a strange home. And it was blinking.

Imagine 4 engineers standing around a box with a blinking red light as if it were a bomb. And they were trying to defuse it. With deep concentration, theories were abounding. There were lively discussions of Ohm's Law. Wattage. Voltage. Is it a 3 amp or 7 amp power supply? Will this power supply talk to the VHUB? What's up with that blinking red light?

None of the engineers knew what the blinking meant. But I did. My dad had asked me about the blinking red lights on the power supplies, and several months ago I had asked around to figure out the answer. Failed inverter test. Temp sensor not working. A pile of old insulation was laying on the power supply enclosure. At least the thing was well insulated. But here we were and Ricardo said that red light had been blinking for several years. Since they installed it, he said.

And it seems strange. The critical information for some 20,000 households was just sort of hanging in some limbo because of a blinking red light that nobody knew what meant.

I really wanted to see that VHUB. I'd seen what they look like in a brochure but I wanted to see what it looked like in its milieu. Deep under the ground, it would require another field trip. We could either open the manhole cover and descend into the bowels of old time Seattle. Or we could take the tour that goes through underground Seattle to find the VHUB. Did you know that there is another Seattle right underneath the Seattle we currently know? Maybe they'll build another Seattle on top of this Seattle someday.

Behind the Scenes of the Internet: Infrastructure engineers looking at a power supply powering a device providing fiber optics to 20,000 customers. At least it's well insulated.