The cable landing station

node

The building where an ocean ends. A landing station is usually an unremarkable low structure set back from a beach, sometimes with no signage at all, and it is where the physical internet becomes visible for a few hundred metres before disappearing again into terrestrial fibre. Its functions are specific. The cable comes ashore through a buried duct or a beach manhole, so that the vulnerable surf zone can be maintained without excavating the beach each time. Inside, the power feed equipment supplies the direct current that runs the repeaters out to mid-ocean. The submarine line terminal equipment converts between the cable's optical channels and the terrestrial network, and it is the piece that gets replaced when a cable is upgraded. There is backup power, because a landing station that loses mains supply takes the seabed plant with it, and there is physical security, because everything in the building is a single point of failure for everything beyond it. Landing stations cluster: a small number of them — Marseille, Alexandria and Abu Talat, Fujairah, Singapore, Mombasa, Virginia Beach — carry a share of world traffic wholly out of proportion to their size, because a coast that is legally, commercially and geologically convenient for one cable is convenient for the next one too.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.