A picture of the Internet, really

Taken with my Palm Treo 750 cell phone under fluorescent light. This is a picture of a part of the Internet backbone (one section out of millions) at the point where it comes into our data center at work. The the conduit goes underground from here. You can see that we have multiple fiber optic cables. The thick black ones are for terrestrial transit and under the rubber there is kevlar, among other things. The thin orange wires are fiber optic glass coated in orange plastic. The glass is so thin that you can easily bend it. At the right is a fiber optic patch panel. The blue cables are spare runs of twisted copper ethernet for local connections. The speed of the uplinks to the rest of the Internet range from 10 Gigabits per second to 1.5 Megabits per second.