The zenith angle Read Online Free PDF Page A

talking over e-mail about having another one.
    Van stubbornly assembled his hardware in the back of the truck, using racks and plastic cable ties. With the rear seats hauled out and left behind in New Jersey, the Range Rover was cozy for him, about the size and shape of a grad student’s office cubicle. With the ongoing network crisis in Manhattan’s pipes and antennas, Van figured that no one would notice his physical absence from Mondiale’s Merwinster offices. Not as long as he stayed on the Internet around the clock.
    Van’s life’s work was software. Although he had seen it done, he would never splice a cable down a manhole. In smoldering Manhattan, Mondiale was trying to call-forward thousands of local numbers, porting them from a smashed and charred facility into underused third-party switching stations in Queens and Hackensack. The FCC was freaking out, so it was willing to let this strange experiment happen. Van knew that Mondiale’s routing algorithms for “local number portability” were not going to scale up. Van knew that the porting code would break. It would break in some interesting ways. He might understand how it had broken, and where. He might figure out how to patch it. That would be nontrivial programming under tremendous time pressure, the kind that very few people could do. It was the most useful emergency service he could offer to his company.
    But to be available to his stricken coworkers, Van needed fast, efficient Internet access, all across America. This sounded pretty simple. But it wasn’t simple. It was impossible. Most of the East Coast was okay for high-speed Net access, except for lower Manhattan, which was on fire now. If Van phoned ahead and called in some favors, he could drive in to campuses and computer centers, to hook up on the superfast Internet2 grid. Van was a regular veteran at the Joint Techs conference, the cabal of geeks and wonks who were building the Next Generation Internet. The sysadmins of Internet2 were very much Van’s kind of people.
    Van had taught at Stanford before Mondiale had made him their world-beating business offer, so the West Coast was even friendlier to Van and his digital needs. There were also big islands of advanced technical sanity in places like Austin, Texas, and Madison, Wisconsin. But out here in Range Rover land, the Internet was a shambles. Van was rolling across America with two women and a baby, and the United States was huge. Van flew across America quite commonly, but he’d never rolled across it before. The USA had cyber-free boondocks that Van had never imagined were there. Cell phones worked for data delivery—sort of. Dottie was fitfully hooking her Motorola into her laptop, using power from the Rover’s cigarette lighter. That might do for the occasional brief e-mail, but that certainly wasn’t Van’s idea of access. For Van, cell phones were like breath mints. Even on America’s major interstates, which were spiked with cell-phone towers from coast to coast, those breath mints had big holes in the middle. Any dip in the highway could drop you right out of a download. Wireless laptops running on Wi-Fi worked only in Wi-Fi hot spots a hundred yards across. That left Van only one way to angle it: the zenith angle. Satellites, straight overhead. Internet access direct from Space, the Final Frontier. Van had never before used a satellite Internet service. He certainly knew that such things existed, but he lacked any reason to mess with them. Van had broadband Internet2
    in his office and two T-1 trunk lines into his house.
    He needed to be practical, though. Outer space would just have to do. Dottie understood this, so she let him work. Dottie needed serious Net access even worse than Van did. Astrophysicists were the world’s heaviest users of scientific broadband. When an astrophysicist wanted to “send a file,” that meant some colossal mountain of data that would simulate the entire atmosphere of the gas-giant Jupiter.