Nowhere Does It Quite Like NYC

Electrical wiring is always impressive in major cities, like New York, where there are massive buildings and copious amounts of people. Though it’s something we take for granted, the fact that companies are able to allow that many people access to things like cable and internet is nothing short of a modern marvel. Vice brings us to the Financial District in downtown New York City to show us just how to wire an entire building with internet, from manhole to manhole….to manhole to manhole…and finally, to said building.

The type of cables used for such a job are called ‘Micro Optical Fiber cables’ and they are tiny tubes of glass the width of a hair. One single cable can provide up to 10 Gbps (gigabits per second) of high-speed internet. Lionel Watson of Pilot Fiber walks us through a basic step-by-step of how you would go about the process of installing internet within a building. Get this…there are 144 fibers that are coming from all the way across town! Basically, you connect one fiber from the main building to the fiber coming from Battery Park, where the main backbone is. But don’t worry…they don’t connect them by hand. They have a machine called a ‘fuser’ that will melt the two fibers together.

It’s a precise job, yet a large scale job. Threading these tiny fibers across the city, from manhole to manhole, then finally to their destination. Who knew that your recent binge-watching Saturday was actually powered via hair-like fibers and threaded under the streets of the city? Well, if you’re in New York, that is.