A young man in blue overalls with a white logo is climbing up and down the telegraph poles in our street, shifting his aluminium ladder methodically from one pole to the next, heading towards our house. His progress is relaxed but steady, which is the Gomeran way of doing things when everything’s going well. On the street lies a large coil of flimsy black cable which he is gradually unrolling to string along the tops of the poles, joining the confusion of other cables already there.
It takes the young technician over an hour to reach our house. He handles the coils of his cable very carefully because this is the latest and cleverest modern technology and therefore very delicate. It will carry light into our house and the light will carry signals at unimaginable speeds. We are about to get a fibra óptica connection to the internet. Optical fibre.
When we first came here some thirty years ago optical fibres were something scientists in white coats played with and wrote incomprehensible papers about. Now they’re everywhere, even here on this little Atlantic rock 350 kilometres off the coast of Western Sahara.
After he has threaded the cable through a hole in our wall the technician spends the best part of another hour connecting it to an enigmatic black box on the sideboard which reassuringly has the word FIBRA embossed on top. Peeling off layer after layer of protective sheathing from the end of the cable he eventually reaches a core no thicker than a hair from my head. ‘Increíble, tan finito!’, so thin, I comment, predictably. He shakes his head: there is still another layer to remove.
Light works in a different way from the old-fashioned electrical signals, of course. Thirty years ago you could see and hear communication taking place. During our annual winter escapes to La Gomera, Janine and I continued working with colleagues in the UK by the then-current technological miracle of fax machines, which chugged out their printed messages and diagrams line by line over the plain old telephone system, fondly known as POTS. One Christmas, two employees of an agency I worked with faxed me a photograph which began with three pairs of feet and over the next half hour worked its way up the legs and beyond to reveal three curvaceous young women in bikinis. The guys still laugh about that so it seems nobody ever made them pay the phone bill.
In our earliest visits we didn’t even have a POTS of our own. Most of the public phone boxes were limited to calls within the Canary Islands, or to mainland Spain if you didn’t mind the echoes, and the nearest telephone capable of transmitting speech across the Atlantic was in a cabinet a steep climb up the hill from our house. There was another in the centre of town, from where I phoned my Mum on our first Christmas Eve here surrounded by a street party and still wearing shorts from an afternoon on the beach.
Ah, those carefree days of youth, when everything was new and wonderful! But there is still new and wonderful to be found if you keep up with it. Finally the fibre man completes his optical connections with a dinky little oven to weld two fibres together and we are ready to see if it works.
The black box on the sideboard now sports four winking blue lights. Unfolding his portable computer the technician connects by wifi to the black box and then to his home base by the new cable. He measures the velocity at which signals travel outwards and inwards. They’re supposed to be the same and very fast, because this service is called banda ancha simétrica, symmetrical broadband. Frowning slightly, he reads the figures then announces that we’ve got around 100 megabits per second.
‘It’s supposed to be three hundred,’ I complain churlishly.
He nods a little sorrowfully. ‘You’d be very lucky to get that. Maybe if you were in town, near the exchange.’ It’s all the bends in the cable, he explains, they slow things down. You wouldn’t think light would be bothered by a few bends but it is, this is the unavoidable physics of optical fibres, which is why he has to be so careful not to introduce any outright kinks as he’s stringing the cable.
‘It’s fast,’ he assures us. ‘A hundred is fast.’ Of course it is, it’s ridiculously fast: 100 megabits per second is 100 million twinkles whizzing through the cable every second. At that rate we could download the whole of Walt Disney’s The tortoise and the hare in a matter of seconds.
Looking back, the old ways such as fax and the postal service now seem only quaint. It really is so much easier to do the same job by clicking a keyboard and sending a PDF file through the internet to arrive at its destination a moment later. There is, though - and the world has discovered this far too late - a huge downside to this efficiency. When you can exchange documents so quickly everyone expects you to work faster. Schedules shrink from weeks to days while the working day expands from eight hours to whatever it takes. Janine and I both suffered from this towards the end of our working careers.
Gomerans seem to resist such pressures fairly successfully. Office workers still go out to a cafe for their mid-morning desayuno (breakfast) of coffee and a snack. They still go out for a sociable lunch in the proper manner and there is a notable absence of little white vans delivering sandwiches to be eaten at desks. (How sad they are really, those damp, lonely sandwiches!) Symmetrical broadband is fine and dandy and everyone’s got it, but there’s much more to life than optical bits, even if they’re mega.
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For anyone who really wants to know, the broadband part of this technology refers to the transmission of many different frequencies all at the same time, which greatly increases the carrying capacity of a fibre optic cable. Symmetrical refers to the transmission speeds being the same for sending and receiving.
For many years they were run a close second by the UK’s National Health Service whose Supply Chain department was still providing fax machines to its users in February 2019, on the grounds of patient data security or some such excuse, but someone finally decided it was time to move on.
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