QuoteIt's no accident that Iowa, where the first transcontinental railroad began, is now home to a huge data-center industry.
INGRID BURRINGTON
Council Bluffs is a mid-sized town in Iowa, right on that state's border with Nebraska. Although better known for cultivating presidential candidates than server racks, Iowa is a pretty popular site for data centers, especially new data centers built by major tech companies. Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have all built custom data centers in the state over the past seven years, and all three are expanding in the region.
Many forces have come together to shape Iowa's data-center industry (which will be discussed in further detail in another story), but it's the state's history as a junction for another major network—railroads—that put it at the top of my list for Cloud sightseeing.
My favorite part of looking for network infrastructure in America is really all the ghosts. Networks tend to follow networks, and telecommunications and transportation networks tend to end up piled on top of each other. The histories of these places isn't always immediately obvious, but it's there, forming a kind of infrastructural palimpsest, with new technologies to annihilate space and time inheriting the idealized promise and the political messiness of their predecessors.
Iowa is no exception. It's pretty much impossible to talk about American Internet infrastructure without talking about railroads, and Iowa is a state rich with railroad history. We came to Council Bluffs because the Union Pacific railroad route for the first transcontinental railroad began in Council Bluffs, a starting point selected for reasons both physical and political.
Full article: http://www.citylab.com/tech/2015/11/how-railroad-history-shaped-internet-history/417759/
I havent read the article just yet, but one of the biggest innovations the railroad industry brought to the internet was the invention of the fiber laying railcar.
When the Anschutz Company owned the Southern Pacific RR, they anticipated the growth in transcon fiber and developed a fiber trough and railcar that could open the trough and lay more fiber on demand from a moving railcar.
While other carriers were shelling more bucks per fiber/mile for dedicated underground right of ways (with their power huts every few miles) Southern Pacific leveraged power already available for signaling and switching near the troughs.
Just as Western Union allowed railroads access to the telegraph lines in exchange for ROW, SP was now offering carriers access to cheap fiber, much of it across inhospitable deserts.
It was a brilliant move and today that fiber is leased to several carriers.