How the World Wide Web gets spun out of thin air

The World Wide Web might sound metaphorical, but it’s actually grounded in a physical web of translucent glass filaments crisscrossing the globe. These fiber-optic cables transmit internet data through tiny beams of light, making it possible for us to be online. It is the largest network humans have ever built, and in coming years, it is set to get a lot bigger. (Jason Alden/Bloomberg/Getty Images) The Biden administration’s $42 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program, or BEAD, signed into law in 2021 and launched last year, aims to connect every household in America with high-speed internet. The program will pay for the installation of fiber-optic cables in all 50 states, with some strung up on telephone poles and others buried underground. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement The Washington Post visited the Corning factory in Midland, N.C. — the largest optical fiber facility in the United States — to see how these cables are made. While Corning’s name is still associated with its Pyrex glass baking dishes, which can withstand extreme temperatures, the company also invented optical fiber in 1970, and these cables are now its largest source of revenue. Step 1: From gas to glass At a glance, optical fiber looks like plastic fishing line, but there’s a lot more to it. In the first step of the manufacturing process, which engineers call laydown, glass is crystallized into a fluffy solid form, like how cotton candy is spun on a stick. Bits of white glass collect onto the stick — called “soot,” even though it has little in common with the stuff in chimneys — until the pillar of glass is a foot or so in diameter. Step 2: Cloudy to clear In the next step, the white, fluffy pillars of glass are dipped vertically into blazing hot furnaces, where they are “cooked” for several hours at more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit to purify them. The glass pillars come out clear, like giant icicles. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Step 3: Free fall In the next step, called the draw, the glass pillar is put in a machine over a hole that descends several floors. As the machine heats up the glass and melts it, the glass begins dripping down, pulled by gravity. When the molten glass drip reaches the bottom, the glob at the end is removed, and the trailing thread is pulled through a machine that keeps the fiber at a uniform thickness as it cools and solidifies. Step 4: Spooling the thread Next, the fibers are coated in different colors to help installing technicians better identify them and are spun onto spools. “We identify any defects and check if it’s okay,” says Job Joseph, 32, who does some of the final inspection work on the assembly line. These glass threads are about the diameter of a human hair, six times stronger than titanium and 40,000 times clearer than a diamond. Other spools are sent to other Corning factories across North Carolina, where they are bundled together into cables and coated with protective materials that can resist the elements. These cables are then deployed across the world, as well as under the oceans, as strands of the World Wide Web. BEAD will be the largest expansion of the U.S. network in decades, but it will be years before many of the country’s consumers notice the change. “The U.S. market is one of our big markets but still only a fraction of what we can do,” Corning CEO Wendell Weeks said. The company expects a global boom from AI computing centers, which also require large quantities of fiber. Already, Weeks said, this invisible global network of fiber is so extensive that if it all the thread were lined up end to end, it would be enough to go to the sun and back 20 times. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2024/fiber-optic-cables-made-materials-high-speed-internet/