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đŸ•ș Networks Follow Infrastructure

I recently learned that rural Americans in the 1890s used barbed wire fences as telephone lines. Not metaphorically. Literally. They connected copper wire from their homes to the nearest fence, and the barbed wire carried their calls across miles of farmland.

This sounds absurd until you think about it for two seconds. The fences were already everywhere. The wire was already strung. Why build a parallel network when one already exists?

This pattern shows up everywhere in the history of communication: networks follow existing infrastructure.

Barbed Wire Telephones

When Bell’s telephone patent expired in 1893, farmers suddenly had access to cheap telephone equipment but no way to connect to each other. Running dedicated lines across miles of rural land was expensive. But barbed wire fences? Those were already there, crisscrossing every property.

The setup was simple: connect your phone to the fence, turn a crank to generate a ring. Every phone on the fence line would ring simultaneously—households developed personalized ring patterns to know who the call was for. A 25-mile system in Colorado cost about $10 to build in 1902.

The signal quality was surprisingly good. The main problem was weather causing short circuits, which farmers solved with improvised insulators: corn cobs, cow horns, glass bottles. These fence phone networks reportedly stayed in use through the 1970s.

The Infrastructure Stack

Here’s a fact that still surprises me: the fiber optic cables carrying your internet traffic today largely follow the same routes as 19th-century railroad tracks.

The layering goes like this:

  1. 1860s: Railroads get rights-of-way across the country
  2. 1880s: Telegraph lines get strung along the railroad tracks
  3. 1900s: Telephone lines follow the telegraph routes
  4. 1980s: Coaxial cable follows the telephone routes
  5. 2000s: Fiber optic follows the coaxial routes

Each generation of communication technology drafted behind the previous one. The legal rights-of-way were already secured. The land was already cleared. The maintenance paths already existed.

Data centers are now being built in old train stations specifically because of the fiber that runs alongside the tracks. The decisions railroad barons made 150 years ago still determine where your packets travel.[1]

The Eiffel Tower Was Supposed to Be Demolished

The Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 World’s Fair with a 20-year permit. By 1909, it was scheduled for demolition.[2]

Gustave Eiffel saved his tower by turning it into a radio antenna.

He convinced the French military that a 300-meter tower in the middle of Paris would be useful for wireless telegraphy. By 1908, the tower could transmit signals 6,000 kilometers. During World War I, intercepted German messages from the tower’s antenna helped turn the tide of the war.

The structure went from “temporary eyesore” to “strategic military asset” because someone realized tall metal things make good antennas. The infrastructure was already there—it just needed a new purpose.

Modern Examples

This pattern hasn’t stopped:

Broadband over power lines: Your electrical wiring can carry internet data. The power grid becomes a network. I used powerline adapters in college to share a router with roommates—just plug an adapter into any outlet and it becomes an ethernet port.

Fiber optic in gas pipelines: Companies like Siemens install fiber optic cables inside natural gas pipelines.[3] The pipe carries gas; the fiber carries data. Same trench, dual purpose.

Sewer and utility tunnels: Fiber optic cables increasingly run through existing underground utility passages. The digging was already done decades ago for water and sewage.

In Software, Same Pattern

This isn’t just a physical infrastructure thing. Software does it constantly.

The entire web runs on port 80/443. When firewalls started blocking everything except HTTP, did we build new protocols? No. We tunneled everything through HTTP. WebSockets, gRPC, GraphQL—they all ride on HTTP because that’s what firewalls allow. The web became the universal transport layer not because it’s the best protocol, but because it’s the one that’s already everywhere.

DNS as a database. DNS was built to map domain names to IP addresses. Now we stuff everything into DNS TXT records: email authentication (SPF, DKIM), domain verification for SSL certs, service discovery, even configuration data. DNS is slow and has size limits, but it’s universally deployed and cached everywhere. So we use it.

Email as infrastructure. Need to send notifications? Password resets? Alerts? Two-factor codes? You could build a new messaging system, or you could just send an email. Everyone already has email. The inbox became the universal notification queue.

Git over SSH. Git doesn’t have its own network protocol for authentication. It just rides on SSH, which was already deployed on every server. One less thing to configure, one less port to open.

The browser as an OS. Why do Electron apps exist? Because the browser runtime is already installed on every computer. Slack, VS Code, Discord—they ship an entire Chrome instance because that’s easier than getting users to install a new runtime. The browser became the universal application platform not because it’s efficient, but because it’s already there.

Webhooks instead of push infrastructure. Need to notify another service when something happens? You could build a message queue, manage connections, handle retries. Or you could just POST to a URL. HTTP is already everywhere. Webhooks are “good enough” because they run on existing infrastructure.

The same pattern plays out: building new infrastructure is expensive; HTTP/DNS/email/SSH are already everywhere; so we tunnel, extend, and repurpose what exists.

The Pattern

Every example follows the same logic:

  1. Building new infrastructure is expensive
  2. Existing infrastructure is already everywhere
  3. Existing infrastructure often has unused capacity
  4. Someone realizes #2 and #3

The barbed wire is already strung. The railroad right-of-way is already cleared. The gas pipeline is already buried. The tower is already standing. HTTP is already allowed through the firewall.

The best network is often the one that already exists. You just have to see it.

Citations

[1] Mapping the Hidden Structures of New York City's Internet Networks — Atlas Obscura ↩

[2] Why Was the Eiffel Tower Kept? — Tour Eiffel ↩

[3] Fibre Optics and Pipelines — OTT Communications ↩

Inspired by Lori Emerson’s A Brief History of Barbed Wire Fence Telephone Networks.