Weaving the Web: Building Bay Area Communications Infrastructures (talk-in-progress)

Weaving the Web:Building Bay Area Infrastructures

Rick Prelinger, KJ6SFTMacroCity

May 2014 rev slightly May 2015

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I'm going to focus this morning on communications infrastructure, and especially infrastructure that isn't visible to the unstudied eye.

The idea of infrastructure that you can't see goes back a long way -- you might say even as far back as latitude and longitude. But for most of us infrastructure evokes thoughts of bridges, railroads, aqueducts, pipelines, roads, piers and other (usually pretty massive) things.

And in fact, while communications themselves are typically invisible and weightless, they're enabled by physical networks that take up a lot of space and absorb a lot of investment. I'm going to talk about the history of communications infrastructure in San Francisco and the Bay Area -- both the hardware and the kinds of messages they have transmitted over many years since the mid-19th century. I'll focus on telephones and radio, but I'll also be talking about other modes of communication that wind into and out of the chronology.

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There's no way this can be a systematic survey. We could do a whole weekend just on telephone infrastructure and the history of its buildout. And while we can try to map communications infrastructure, such a map could never be complete because it is both formal and informal, longterm and temporary, established and opportunistic. Instead, what I'm going to try and do is present a highly visual (and audible) run-through of some of the history and extrapolate outwards to what infrastructure history suggests about the present and future. I'll also suggest a few points that might be part of an agenda for contemporary infrastructurists in the hopes of getting a conversation going.

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How would you communicate in the days before telephones?

PostalMessengers (telegraph boys) American District Telegraph Co.Telegrams -- Telegraph lines connected SF with San Jose, Stockton, Sacramento and Marysville starting in 1853; in the same year a wire was extended over the dunes from Point Lobos lookout to Telegraph Hill and the Merchants' Exchange downtown to signal news of incoming ships; 1859 to LA (so that SF paper could get news directly from the LA stages); briefly news from Pony Express to Carson City and thence to SF via telegraph; 1861 transcontinental telegraph completed.

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In a time of unemployment, drought and anti-Chinese violence, telephone service came to SF in 1877. I wonder whether social and economic unrest encouraged adoption of the telephone, with its ability to pass on information instantaneously without mediation. An odd system -- no way to ring the operator directly. So if you wanted to call someone, you first signaled the District Telegraph Office (in the same room as the telephone switchboard) which tapped out your call on the tape, and then the tape was passed by a telegraph operator to a switchboard operator who connected your line to the line you wanted. Until about 1880 the operators were teenage boys, but their language was considered unseemly: "Hello hello what do you want," "Are you through? Well, why don't you hang up?"

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1887 housetop wiring. Soon almost all downtown roofs had a frame supporting telephone, telegraph and messenger wires. In residential neighborhoods boards were nailed to roofs and projected out from the buildings. Wires were out in the open to allow for inspection.

Rooftop wiring was a pain -- people hanging up laundry or working on roofs were always tripping on wires.Telephone poles were introduced in 1880 and gradually replaced housetop lines. But streets were dusty and wet dust permeated by fog blew onto wires and shorted them out. This typically evaporated by noon, but it was often hard to make calls in the morning. Insulated cables therefore were put into service.

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Branch exchanges were established over the growing city starting in 1886. Underground cables were first installed downtown in 1892, which is why we don't see cables in the famous 1906 Market Street film. During this period there is constant innovation and reinvestment; in the early 1880s, for instance, every Edison-manufactured phone in the city was replaced by a Bell telephone. But soon afterward the "long distance" telephone set replaced all the others.

now, of course, open-wire telephone circuits are few and far between. Telephone calls are sometimes carried by microwave, largely replaced by fiber and sometimes satellite

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By the 1890s, businesses had warmed to the telephone but the general public still saw them as frivolous and expensive. Pacific Telephone introduced four and ten-party lines in 1894, which were much cheaper, and gained some subscribers, and in 1896 came up with a further innovation: the "kitchen telephone." For 50c/month you could call out to order food and other supplies for the house, but the phone had no bells, and could not be called from outside. Plus there were over 20 other telephones on the same line, so it was frequently busy. The idea was to get customers to appreciate the convenience one-way service and desire two-way service. This was tremendously successful.

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Pretty much all telephone service was destroyed by the 1906 quake and fire. Here is the first temporary directory card after the fire and a page from an October 1906 directory. Note all the "temporary" numbers. Engine company 11's phone number is "Butchertown 18." By late 1907 service was substantially back to normal. The devastation was only one of the infrastructural challenges. Because downtown was mostly destroyed, businesses relocated to the Western Addition and to the Mission (which for awhile hoped to become the main retail district of the city). About 100,000 residents left, and about 66,000 moved to outlying sections where land was cheaper. It was difficult to plan telephone service expansion in an ordinary manner. But by 1912 there were over 100,000 phones in service.

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National Phone Directory -- the phones that could interoperate

1892: New York-Chicago service, 950 miles, opened; this book stretches out to St Louis

on the right: see A G Bell

[Chinese Telephone Exchange film, ca. 1948]omitted in this version


prior to 1890s: Chinese telephone exchange, 742-3 Washington St(use process plate)http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Chinese_Telephone_Exchangefurther info in Historical Review

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Oakland 192212Monday, June 8, 15

Oakland 1922 "Pekin" telephone exchange

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How about broadcasting news, entertainment and music over telephone lines? Perhaps not unlike AT&T and Comcast going into the programming business.1913 -- about ten Telephone Herald affiliated companies actually started up in the USthe Oakland company seems not to have gone beyond demonstrations at Capwell's storein 1881, dual lines had been used in Paris for stereophonic listeninga similar system started up in Budapest in 1893 and actually lasted until 1944

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some applications.This may seem laughable, but we might read this failed attempt as an early realization that the copper network which extended throughout an area was ripe for repurposing.

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Prior to the opening of PPIE, Pacific Telephone was asked to furnish service to the Ball of All Nations in May 1914. They built a hidden network of wires under the floor, connected with copper nails set close apart in the floor. The spouse of a telco employee wore copper-soled shoes from which wires ran up through her clothing to a telephone set. She asked her dancing partners whom they'd like to talk with, and suddenly they were on the phone. A switchboard operator listened in on all conversations and whenever she heard a name rushed through a call on special lines.

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1914: July: first transcon phone call, before reliable roads crossed the country"But the big celebration didn't occur until January 25, 1915, at a meeting in San Francisco. Sitting in New York, Alexander Graham Bell said into the phone what he had once said decades before: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you." But this time Watson, sitting in San Francisco, replied, "It will take me five days to get there now!"The call involved five intermediary telephone operators and took 23 minutes to connect.

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Later in 1915, first xmsn of speech across Atlantic by radiotelephonecommercialized NY-London, and then SF-London 1927This ad contains deep strain of nativism -- expand

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Dec 22 1923: second transcontinental route opened, southern routeJan 17 1927: third line, northern routelater a fourth

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Long distance was quite an expensive proposition. Multiply these 1922 rates by about 14 to get the cost of a phone call.

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late 1920s, early 1930s saw adoption of labor-saving customer dialing. This took a great deal of education, but was a great step forward in customer-powered infrastructure

[A Nation At Your Fingertips film, ca. 1951]omitted in this version


Direct Distance Dialing -- first call 1951 from Englewood, NJ to the mayor of Alameda.I think one can't overestimate the importance of this development. It was unmediated personal point-to-point communication; no need for operators or for booking calls in advance. In its time it was a paradigm-breaker like the Internet.

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Area Code 318 was the original Bay Area codeexpansion of suburbia and telephone construction in Bay Area shown in phone directoriesthis is from 1957

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The address phone directories are great resources -- this is from 1956, and it offers an amazing glimpse of the neighborhood we are right now sitting inInteresting to see how uneven the spread of telephone service was even in relatively prosperous times for a relatively prosperous city

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San Francisco's fire alarm box system dates its origins back to 1865. The Central Fire Alarm Station was opened in 1915 next door to 1001 Turk, currently the DECS building.What happens when an alarm comes in? Well, it is manifested by a blinking pilot light, telegraph sounder, illuminated box list, and inking register. This occurs at the central station. We must now give the answer to the question which asks us about the operation of the alarm box on the street.Alarm boxes on streets were mechanical -- wound like clocks.

When the handle on a certain box is pulled (let us say it is box 7743), what actually happens is that the pulling of the handle releases an electric brake on the inking register attached to that circuit and which is located at headquarters. Next, the coded digit wheel in the box starts to revolve. This coded wheel has notches cut in it and forms one constant of the circuit. A stationary finger forms the other contact. As the wheel revolves, the notches cut in it pass under the stationary finger and the circuit is interrupted for a fraction of a second while this is taking place. This interruption in the circuit causes the pen on the inking register at the central station to rise and make a mark on the already moving tape. [15] The inking register which responses to a certain box is obviously the one connected to the circuit to which that box is connected. The tape reading for an alarm pulled at box 7743 would look like this:

(------- ------- ---- --- ). Since each box sends out four rounds of the alarm, the completed tape for an alarm would look like this:

(------- ------- ---- ---- ------- ------- ---- --- Continuing------- ------- ---- --- ------- ------- ---- ---)

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Most alarm boxes continued to function throughout the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. There are 2040 still on the streets. There are also 460 police call boxes dating back to 1916. As of 2012 each rookie cop got a call box key upon graduating from the Police Academy.

80% of calls are false alarms; 20% legitimate, but the system is inherently hardened against disaster and saves lives.

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Wikimedia Commons


first mobile phones in the 1940s, but only a few channels in each city. very expensive. Everything arranged through operator, and originally push-to-talk (half duplex).IMTS (Improved Mobile telephone Service) introduced 1965, used more channels. customers could dial (unless making credit card calls). Limited to a few hundred subscribers in Northern California.


AMPS -- Advanced Mobile Phone Systemkey thing is frequency reuse

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1983 -- DynaTac mobile phone -- here's one for saleservice opened in some cities in US 1983GSM 1990sSMS 1993 -- first GSM nets start to populate the US in 1995-96

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cell phone roaming, laborious and difficult

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Lots of education was required.

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...and still is. cell phone etiquette ca, 2001


If you visit Lawrence Livermore Lab, you'll be invited to sequester your cellphone outside the security perimeter in one of these little lockers.

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paging -- this is the Bravo Display Pager, from 1988Many people look down on paging but it's a tremendously efficient system for multicasting, and it's still heavily used by public safety people.There were at least 9 major paging companies in the Bay Area in 2000, filling the air with the sound of relatively low-speed bits simulcast from many transmitters. It is illegal to monitor paging, but there was an active subculture, and the information passed over paging networks was pretty amazing. Perhaps some of you looked at the Wikileaks dump of 9/11 pager messages.PageNet, PageMart/Weblink, Skytel, Cook Inlet, Metrocall, TSR, Network Services, MAP, Airtouch,

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EVERY SYSTEM OF ORGANIZATION BREEDS ITS OWN KIND OF DECONSTRUCTION --early phone phreaking -- playing with infrastructureThis was my blue box that I bought in spring 1972 from Wozniak and Jobs, who came around the dorms at UC Berkeley to sell them. I scraped together $100 to buy their demo after a wild evening jumping around from tandem to tandem and country to country. It was my first direct experience feeling the intensity of being in touch with a living network...We tapped into the line and recorded the evening phreak,, and I actually tried to track down my freshman college roommate, a real tape-head, to see whether he still had the tape so I could play you an excerpt tonight, but his 2-year-old had destroyed it some years ago.Here it is on exhibit at the Computer History Museum.

[Young Telephone Hackers newsreel, ca. 1959]omitted in this version


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Radio is as old as the universeIt passes through everything including our bodiesWe are still hearing cosmic radio noise from the Big Bang.

wireless: added to what used to be an ambient presence of the natural world, we now have a chaotic collection of vectors

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Every built-up area is blanketed by emissions from powerful broadcast transmitters that are coordinated to avoid interference.FM and TV use unbelievably high amounts of power, line-of-sight, located on mountaintops or high towerslower-power stations usually on buildings

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AM and shortwave broadcasters use towers sited in areas of high ground conductivity, like wetlands; here is KGO, in the South Bay near the Dumbarton Bridge

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then there is a bewildering fabric of lower-power transmissions, from the wi-fi chips and cellular radios we all carry around to the RFID tags on library books, passports and pallets at Costcofamily radiosportable public safety radiossmart meterslist more


if we were to reconstruct the history of the 20th century through wireless transmissions we could hear, it might begin with natural radio noise: this is the dawn chorus.

Later, we'd hear dots and dashes punctuating background static;the early amateurs -- code, later voice and music;1909 -- first transmissions from San Jose, a long time later this station would evolve into KCBS, our all-news station


broadcasting pioneers in 1920s -- this is 1929a narrow slice of the spectrum fills with chaotic sounds -- all kinds of orgs on the airthis is cleaned up after 1927, and there are fewer but more powerful stations on the clear channels, and lower-power localsmeanwhile on the marshes and by the coast powerful shortwave xmtrs broadcast to the world and to ships at sea


1935: the point here is that broadcast radio was not necessarily a local medium. Low-power or daytime-only stations served local needs, but the invisible landscape of AM radio was filled with signals from far away (though usually not over the Rockies).Note that at this early stage the AM dial barely stretched past 1500 kcs.

April 1926


Broadcast radio becomes a mainstream medium; people rely on it to fulfill a vast spectrum of needs and desires in the same way they would rely on television

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early TV -- mechanical (not much happening in SF, except maybe amateurs)September 7, 1927: Philo T. Farnsworth uses his image dissector camera tube to send a single straight line from one room to another in his lab at 202 Green Street. The line is inscribed on a backlighted glass slide. Next year he demos it for his backers, who are anxious to see financial return, and transmits a dollar sign. In 1929 he sends pictures of people, including a 3-1/2 image of his wife whose eyes are closed against the blinding lights. This was the world's first working all-electronic TV system.Imagine weak signals that barely radiated past a room as a faint but historically significant peak on the spectrum graph

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by the late 1930s a sophisticated wireless infrastructure is in placemilitarized in the 1940s like the whole bay areanaval transmitters everywhere: Alameda, Skaggs Islandvast amount of traffic passes through bay area


1930s: pioneers of two-way radio start to build out systems in the Bay Area; Berkeley was one of the first in the country. This is Home-O-Graf, from 1948; a localized radio guide for the Bay Area, listing shortwave, AM, FM and even police calls. I like that it looks at radio holistically, giving every mode attention.

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San Francisco's police radio system was lowband, on 45 megacycles -- this system is still in place in SFPD cars for lowband

kind of a pure sound, but subject to interference and skip

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January 26, 1957


TV -- January 26, 1957Unlike NY, LA and Philadelphia, SF did not get TV until after World War II. But the region built out fairly quickly. Here is the lineup as of January 1957.

Radio-Electronics, August 1967

"Long Hot Summer":TampaDetroitBuffalo

MilwaukeeMinneapolis

NewarkPlainfield

New Haven+ 151 more


Starting in 1964, American cities are racked by civil unrest, and money begins to flow from the federal government to local jurisdictions to fund riot-control equipment, and to modernize communications systems. With the possibility of taxpayer-subsidized sales, manufacturers perfect the handheld walkie-talkie so that each cop can have his or her own radio. Old-time two-way radio systems in which cars or handheld radios and dispatchers would transmit directly to one another are replaced by repeater systems.

As is so often true, the existence of communications triggers an interest in intercepting them, and portable tunable radios (always available, but expensive) are mass-marketed. Around 1968 scanners show up on the market, becoming quite sophisticated by the late 1970s.

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1970s: microwave dishes start to proliferate around the city, some environmental concern. Paul Brodeur writes The Zapping of America.study about effects of non-ionizing radiation in SF (Bob Toll)


But over time cell and PCS base stations proliferate and we carry wifi devices on our bodies, and the concern over RF exposure is held by fewer people.These are ENG dishes at a fire in South of Market

one note: antennas retreat into the background of the urban landscape

proliferation of smaller antennas as frequencies get higher

sutrotower.com

sutrotower.org


1973: collocation of many TV stations and some FM stations at Sutro Tower, an incredible concentration of RF energypreviously at San Bruno Mountain, Mt Allison (by Mission Peak in Fremont), Monument Peak (same), Mt. DiabloSeveral Bay Area stations serve their city of license of San Jose from San Bruno Mountain and Fremont.


Several Bay Area stations serve their city of license of San Jose from San Bruno Mountain and Fremont.

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We see many communications dropping out of the audible mode starting in the 1980sSensitive communications: tactical, narcotics, executive protection; special need for scrambling and encryptionThe Feds start to scramble pervasively.now, for instance, the US Park Police and the rangers are scrambledscrambling becomes pervasive, then encryption1980s: copper-wire and microwave-based traffic moves to fiberECPA, 1986: illegal to decode or decrypt digital transmissions, cellular telephone signals

Wikimedia Commons55Monday, June 8, 15

trunking -- explain trunked system. This is a small subset of the list of talkgroups used by the San Francisco Emergency Communications System.This was conceived as a means of spectrum conservation, and would seem a promising development.

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after 9-11-2001: call for interoperability -- we have had an interagency, interoperable system in SF since before that

Fed post 9/11 interoperability funding and system constructionthe SF emergency notification system, sirens and speakers

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1990s: beginning of massive data traffic, starts as a trickleThis rate card, from 2000, brings us into the present. Can we build sufficient infrastructure to support the heavy bandwidth that people jump to use? Many people are reluctant to live or work next to RF emitters. And yet I wonder how many people know what those things are right outside their windows. Right now net neutrality is at risk; bandwidth gobbling is one of the excuses. Obviously much of it is not wireless, but mobile's percentage continues to rise.

Trajectories

• movement from direct radio links to virtual, mediated links (as in telephony)• increasing turn toward silos, non-interoperability• hardware-based vs SDR• increasingly complex systems• secret or covert communications infrastructures (as in Cold War)• networks to monitor movement and criminal behavior — both commercial and government


So, here are some historical TRAJECTORIES we can track:

movement from direct point-to-point links to two-way to repeaters to trunked systemsquestion of silos and interoperability -- example of SFPD data requests -- first, requests over the voice system, then commercial cellular packet data (CDPD), then their own networktalk about traditional receivers re SDR

Broad themes

fixed —> mobileinfrastructure shrinks

infrastructure moves from middle to edgesconstant friction over control

spectrum regulation vs laissez-fairefreedom to build out?

what's private, if anything?


-- fixed to mobile is the great infrastructural change of our time. But mobile isn't really mobile -- it takes massive, and often expensive, fixed infrastructure to enable mobility. We may have to rethink how we invest.

-- infrastructure can be miniaturized. Also, infrastructure can be built into the edges of the network: mesh networks, etc. But quite often providers of bandwidth or other currently rivalrous goods/services resist giving up control. Look at how many home-based solar systems cannot function when the grid goes down for fear they will push power back into an ailing grid and zap utility workers. Not every cellphone subscriber is allowed to tether.

spectrum is highly regulated in such a way that certain users are subsidized (e.g., broadcast) and others pay heavily. should we open spectrum up to frequency-agile equipment that listens for empty spaces and hops to wherever it can? should we have more unlicensed spectrum -- this enabled the wifi boom

-- steady move towards deregulation, but this is not inevitable-- as we have seen in San Francisco, wireless siting constantly rubs up against private property and perceived health and safety concerns-- uncertain situation regarding privacy. While we have moved from party-line phones and telegrams to encrypted GSM telephony, this increase in privacy is really user-to-user. At the same time our communications are pretty transparent to government agencies at many levels, and of course we voluntarily share a huge amount of personal information with corps. This is a festering, unresolved issue.

Convenience and fragility


Our communications infrastructure trends towards stability (e.g., fiber) but also fragility. Our existing landline phone infrsatructure is robust, but people don't want it, and are giving it up in the name of portability. People are neglecting the well-engineered but boring POTS infrastructure for exciting terminals, like smartphones. Portability, convenience.Landlines and pagers worked well. Broadcast radio worked well as an information platform.We have distributed our communications and information systems over a wider variety of platforms, but they are often more fragile and more expensive.At the same time the transmission system and its bandwidth capacity are stressed by data bloat: Netflix, ad-choked webpages, client-side code. I'm not one of those people who believe spectrum is inherently scarce, but the tools that make spectrum efficiency possible are not yet well-distributed or even invented.

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There is well-grounded suspicion about the security and independence of many commercial networks and services. I wonder if we'll see the rebirth of messengers, steganography, couriers.Drones that deliver to verifiable consignees.ULINE drone photo?

Bounty of the boom


How might we imagine future urban communications infrastructure? One suggestion would be to build alternatives that look beyond (or bypass) locked-down commercial services.There are informational needs that are not necessarily well met by web-based services or apps that each carry their own logins, accounts and formalities. Today many of us rely on Twitter for generalized situational awareness. I commute down the coast and check #sfdpw before leaving to see whether sand has piled up on the Great Highway. When I hear prolonged sirens I check @scannersays or @Emergency_in_SF (or even search "Richmond District") to see where the fire might be. Twitter also performs a lot of jobs that we used to be handled by email, listservs and especially one-way paging. Twitter is a simply-conceived service whose core services need to survive in some fashion no matter what the company decides it wants to turn in to.

There are other services built for boom times that we need to make sure survive when the inevitable bust arrives.

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Something I'd like to see, and I know this is contrarian and even oldskool, would be hyperlocal news and information radio. An extremely low-latency station or set of stations that told you what you needed to know when leaving the house, perhaps a 15- or 30-minute loop. Our news radio today devotes a small portion of its time to San Francisco proper, and a large proportion of its airtime is devoted to advertising.Broadcast radio is 105 years old, if you trust that KCBS (formerly KQW in San Jose and perhaps even FN --c heck) started voice broadcasting in 1909. Broadcast radio has worked well as an information platform.

I think there is a market for this. I did an analysis a few years back and found that the biggest expenses of running a news station, besides labor, related to the background work to make traffic reports happen. If you report on traffic it's got to be good. You cannot just read off what the CHP sites and Google Maps tell you.


We might imagine a "smart", open infrastructure that enabled the exchange of critical information -- for example, information relating to personal health and safety, or tracking the movement of autonomous vehicles, or place-based historical information -- but to do this we would have to set up a platform- and system-agnostic interoperable network that can talk with both public and private [entities], and I think this is very difficult. It doesn't make sense that you need to have a paid-up cellular data plan or authenticate your wifi credentials in order to peer with a network, or agree to Draconian terms of service.

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Community wireless networks are often built not to rely on commercial bandwidth providers or government services. We can bypass these now. Here is a proposal from the 1960s -- explain Kaliflower and intercommunalism -- to use CB to link communes.SFLan project has been going on for some time, and there are others -- you will know more

Take the nationwide network of radio amateurs as a sort of prototype. Use unlicensed spectrum open to bits of any flavor and think about scaling them to offer high-speed data and video. We need to agitate for more unlicensed spectrum and use the hell out of it.

Perceiving the invisible


HOW DO YOU "SEE" WIRELESS

So, just to end quickly, how would you make a field guide to invisible infrastructure?

1. Antenna observation

• ham• microwave• broadcast transmitting• TV receiving• satellite receiving dish• satellite uplink• radio telescope• cell transmitter• radar• CB• wireless internet• wifi• smart meter• auto satellite radio

2. Spectrum breakdown

• use spectrum analyzer or frequency counter• SDR (dongles)

3. Traffic analysis

• metadata is everything

4. Observation

• SDR• Near field• Close call


Here are some of the indicators one might track, and some tools of observation.This is fun, and I'm waiting for someone to make a really cool guide to wireless infrastructure.

Thank you!

[email protected], [email protected]@footage



Weaving the Web: Building Bay Area Communications Infrastructures (talk-in-progress)

Engineering