Hub City

Recently, the City of Chicago undertook a year-long “branding study” of Chicago’s role in the world marketplace. Study participants, more than eighty corporate and media executives, were asked who Chicago would be if it were a person. The two most popular answers were Tom Hanks and Joe Montana, which, when crunched through a sophistic equation, correlated to a “famous” person who was “mainstream but slightly bland… broad shouldered, but would need some time in the gym.”

The study didn’t tell Chicagoans anything they didn’t already know. Chicago belongs to the pantheon of hardcore capitalist business and transit centers that drive the world economy: Hong Kong, Singapore, Frankfurt, Osaka, Milan. Each of these cities rose to prominence on equal parts geographic location and direct relationship to larger cosmopolitan centers such as New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, and Rome. While the second-tier global cities labor in the shadows of their larger siblings, they provide the infrastructure and raw materials that make the larger cities work.

For Chicago, its advantages were initially natural, as the main water and, later, rail hub for goods coming to and from the western frontier—though, as historian William Cronon points out in his epic Nature’s Metropolis, Toledo or St. Louis could have filled that bill just as well if not for the city’s farsighted move to raise the capital to open the Illinois-Michigan Canal in 1848. When highways replaced railroads as the primary mode of ground travel, the U.S. interstates all converged just west of the city. As commercial aviation grew into a global enterprise, Chicago laid claim to the world’s busiest airport. When the information age came to the fore, Chicago’s leaders took deliberate steps to make sure that Chicago would retain its hub function. In an industry in which location, supposedly, does not matter, Chicago’s leaders found ways to make geography work for them—and began, long before the boom of the late ‘90s, to stake its claim for a particular niche in the tech industry.

“The Internet means nothing without the communications networks to support it,” says Dan Lyne, Director of Tech Development for World Business Chicago. “Pound for pound, Chicago boasts the most advanced wired or unwired digital infrastructure of any single metro in the United States ... if not the world.” Nobody talks about Chicago as a tech city. But the advanced networking systems being developed there—though less sexy than the new hardware, software, and web applications being developed in Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley—are helping drive a revolution in Chicago’s economy. With a rate of change from manufacturing to service jobs that outpaces even New York, Chicago is playing a critical, if unheralded, role in the new economy—a role paying dividends like a 38 percent annual growth rate in downtown living and a projected increase of 1.6 million square feet of office space within the downtown Loop for each of the next twenty years.

The Work of Chicago’s Innovators

Joe Mambretti sits in the ground floor conference room of a recently constructed, low-rise office building in downtown Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago. He is staring out the window at building cranes creaking and swinging across the partially poured concrete apartment towers that have begun to litter the west side of this once teetotaling college town. Mambretti is the Director of the International Center for Advanced Internet Research, based at Northwestern University, and he looks like he doesn’t often leave his office. His salt and cinnamon hair is mussed, and he twirls a pen in his hand, smiling in an uninterrupted manner that says, my boy, you have no idea what is waiting for you right around the corner.

“Dan Lyne sent you here to talk about why Chicago is the center of the advanced networking universe, and why no one but the three of us knows about it,” he says—begrudgingly accepting the current state of affairs but delighted that I have shown interest. “What do you know about large-scale network infrastructures?”

“Absolutely nothing,” I reply.

He nods, with no discernible decrease in delight. Apparently, this is not an uncommon answer. “It helps to know, so take a look at this.”

On the conference table sits a roughly 4’x2’ super-HDTV set channeling the future of the Internet. It’s only a prototype, but it’s jaw-dropping. The screen has substantially higher resolution and overall quality than those available today. The frame within the screen resembles a webpage but with multiple video streams and data fields. In one corner CNN is rebroadcasting footage of the Howard Dean meltdown in Iowa. To the bottom, a smaller video window shows an Indian cricket match. Uttering the word “search” reveals a small window, which, when “fish” is entered, displays a page of thumbnail images. Each represents a video clip from somewhere in the world that mentions the word “fish.”

As Mambretti surfs the world’s cable networks in a manner that today can be done only by satellite, he explains to me that worldwide Internet traffic is doubling every year. Massive global applications like 3-D design imaging and Computer Assisted Design networks consume a much larger chunk of bandwidth than DSL, digital cable, or even business and government networks. These applications, employed by auto manufacturers and architects, engineers and geneticists, and bio and nanotechnologists, require a medium that can transport terabytes of data. Mambretti and his colleagues’ solution is to use light.

Distilling astrophysics and broadcast engineering into one workable concept, Mambretti and his partners are developing “lightpaths,” known as photonic networks, which will travel across optical fiber lines bundled in thousands of strands. To that end, Mambretti and a select coalition of Illinois’ technical and research communities, including the International Center for Advanced Internet Research, Northwestern, the University of Illinois-Chicago, Fermi Labs, Argonne National Laboratory, the National Center for Superconducting Applications, and the University of Chicago, have already begun to construct the world’s largest, fastest, and most advanced information networks—and hardly anyone knows about it. For the next half-hour I am led on a mind-bending multimedia presentation of the various National Science Foundation-funded global super-networks Mambretti has helped build, starting with the Startap network hub (http://www.startap.net), created in 1997, and continuing with StarLight, the next generation network developed in 2002.

Most recently, the Global Ring Network for Advanced Application Development (GLORIAD) provides a cutting-edge tool for researchers around the world to address vital scientific issues like joint responses to natural and manmade disasters, safeguards for nuclear materials, better understanding of the human genome, joint exploration of space, monitoring of seismic events, and environmental studies and simulations. GLORIAD begins in Chicago at the StarLight facility, managed by the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University. The network’s lines cross the Atlantic Ocean to the NetherLight facility in Amsterdam, continue to Moscow, then to the Russian science city of Novosibirsk, and across Siberia to the Chinese border at Zabajkal’sk. After crossing the border to Manzhouli, the network continues to Beijing, then Hong Kong, then crosses the Pacific Ocean to complete the ring in Chicago. From the StarLight hub, other networks in Chicago soon will be able to connect to GLORIAD.

On a daily basis, Mambretti and his colleagues deal with concepts that are, pardon the pun, light years ahead of public comprehension. Yet he predicts that the capacity for data transfer embodied in GLORIAD, the video search capacities on a HDTV screen, and other technologies will be commonplace in the home in the near future. Five years from now, Googling will mean accessing every piece of media in the world, digitized and cross-referenced to be available through one portal with a single command. Say you are working intently on dinner in your kitchen, thinking about having fish, sea bass in particular, and you want a unique recipe. You ask your screen to search for “sea bass,” “dinner recipes,” and “2009,” and it retrieves a list of cooking programs aired anywhere in the world during 2009 that featured sea bass. You can then narrow your search to English-speaking programs or even find the exact second at which a specific word is uttered, say, “cilantro.” And you can bet that, somewhere in the mix, the information you receive will come through Chicago.

netary Hub of the Future

“I love the Hub metaphor for Chicago, but most of our historical hub distinctions were designated by geography,” Mambretti says. “This is the one that was not. These types of people and institutions do not happen passively. Our research community had to work very hard to create them. We have put in the investment and built the infrastructure while other cities are still asking themselves how they can attract the tech community. What we have done here in Chicago, the infrastructure we have built, will be the basis of the digital economy of the future. It was, of many examples, one of the primary reasons Boeing chose to relocate here.”

Still, geography had quite a bit to do with it, as did Chicago’s historical role as Hub City. As Dan Lyne mentioned, Chicago is one of the most wired cities in the world, offering broadband access to almost every sector of the city and the bulk of the metropolitan area. This innovation was possible largely because the nation’s network of fiber optic cable developed primarily along rail rights-of-way, which converge on downtown Chicago. Local data lines use existing freight tunnels to extend throughout downtown. The overall network of the region has been heavily developed by the private sector, most notably the original Bell company and then Ameritech, and lately by RCN, AT&T, and Comcast, which laid out the networks that analog cable and DSL use today. These same companies are converting their old hub-and-spoke copper networks to fiber optic cable networks in order to carry all-digital signals.

Already, Chicago has leveraged these unique advantages to seize commercial opportunities. For example, Mambretti helped design and build the most advanced convention/hotel/exhibition network in the world for the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, the agency that welcomes twelve million visitors a year to Chicago’s behemoth McCormick Place convention center and Navy Pier. Known as “Internet2,” this high-speed, high-capacity network allows for instantaneous transfer of multiple files consisting of hundreds of megabytes of data each. By comparison, today’s “broadband” can only handle somewhere from 1.5 to 3 megabytes per second.

Ellen Barry, Chief Information Officer of the MPEA, says she became aware of Chicago’s place in the tech world when the city began losing convention business to cities like Atlanta, Orlando, and San Diego. Barry and her colleagues realized that they needed to act fast to stem the outflow of conventions, or else one of Chicago’s core industries might collapse.

Barry learned that McCormick Place had “second–class” Internet service and desperately needed an upgrade. She committed herself to developing a “plug-and-play system where we can get a high-speed connection to anyone in any area of our complexes within ten minutes.” That may seem like a standard requirement today, but only four years ago it was a logistical nightmare. In early 2001, Barry struck a deal with Cisco Systems to rewire the complex. Cisco installed the backbone equipment, and the MPEA laid all 500 miles of fiber optic wiring. With that step completed, Barry worked to connect MPEA with the Metropolitan Research and Education Network so that it can connect to the Abilene national networks and the international networks at StarLight, and so that it would be compatible not only with Internet2 but also the forthcoming “National Lambda Rail” technology, which some call “Internet3.”

As a result, SUPERCOMM 2004, the world’s largest annual gathering for communication service providers and private network managers, returns to Chicago this year after more than a decade away. Launched in 1988, the event has rotated among several cities, including Atlanta, New Orleans, Dallas, and Anaheim. SUPERCOMM will make its home at McCormick Place for the next three years, a major coup for the City That Works.

Building Networks for All

Chicago is using its leadership position in Internet infrastructure not only to attract business, but also to tackle the “digital divide” by providing universal access throughout the city to high-speed Internet. CivicNet, a ten-year, $320 million, private sector incentive program to accelerate the development of high-speed communications in Chicago neighborhoods, would create a giant network to provide data and voice services to the city’s agencies and facilities. The network would aggregate the business of city agencies by connecting all public buildings—schools, park district field houses, Chicago Housing Authority buildings, transit stations, police and fire stations, and public libraries—to a single network, creating some 1,600 node sites from which fiber optic lines can be laid out to provide Internet access for every building on every block of the city.

CivicNet is an ambitious plan that, unfortunately, rings of much of the optimism of the late ‘90s tech boom. Local telecom group RCN, which was to have already built all the fiber optic lines, has been in major financial straits since the recent economic downturn and has defaulted on all its local funding and development agreements with the city. Still, city officials and Mambretti assure naysayers that the project is on track, just being adapted to another timetable.

Regardless of what becomes of CivicNet, this project is significant if only because it has diagrammed what future city networks will look like and how “network” access could eventually be made available to all, just as TV and radio were. When the first CivicNet is in place, the infrastructure will exist to introduce next generation optical networking, and eventually photonic tera-networks like Lambda Rail, StarLight, and TransLight, to the general population.

Chicago has perfected the distribution of essential commodities, taking everything imaginable and spinning it once through the hub before flinging it out to the far corners of the globe. Because of the persistent effort of local visionaries in academia, business, and government, Chicago is rising to the upper tier of the tech world. Through new high-speed networks radiating out from this Big City on the Lake, in the future everyone and everything, whether physically or virtually, will pass through Chicago.