This is the Mtskheta district. The Mtskheta district is in the, hmm, the Mtskheta-Mtianeti region of Georgia—the country Georgia, not the town in Vermont, Georgia. The American State, Vermont, not the neighborhood in Melbourne, Australia, Vermont. The country Australia, not the village in Cuba, Australia. The country, Cuba not the… oh, boy. Ok, it’s not that confusing.
The Mtskheta district’s largest town is Mtskheta. I’d try to tell you more about the district but that’s all Wikipedia gives me and, in what you’ll soon realize is a fantastically ironic twist, their website is down. Elsewhere in the district is the small village of Armazi where there lived a 75-year-old named Hayastan Shakarian.
Now, there are actually two Armazi’s—one’s a famous archeological site, one’s a tiny, rather boring riverside village. I know you don’t care, but I care. I care because I spent an hour trying to figure out why our 75-year-old lived in a village last inhabited in the year 736. So, to be clear, we’re talking about this Armazi, not this one. So, there’s not a whole lot of info out there about this Armazi, but what we do know is that it has a railway station. The railway station is relevant not because it provides low-cost, environmentally friendly transport and, by extension, social and economic mobility, even though we do love that, but rather because that means that the railway runs through the village and that means that something else runs through the village—a fiber optic cable.
That’s because, at some point, Georgia’s state-owned railway company, Georgian Railways, thunk a thought. You see, way far away from Armazi is the port city of Poti which sits on the Black Sea, the world’s greatest kidney-shaped body of water. Poti also happens to be the landing site for the Caucasus Cable System, which stretches all the way west to Bulgaria. The Caucasus Cable System is, according to its website, a super-great, super-cool submarine telecommunications cable that transmits as much as 12.6 terabytes of data each second. This direct route connecting to Europe’s land-based cables means that Georgia can get its internet without having to rely on connections through places that it doesn’t get along too well with, like Russia. It also, apparently, speeds up the connection, meaning data from London can make it to Georgia in just 54 milliseconds.
This is all super-great, we love this, but in order to get to where people live in Georgia, like Tbilisi, you’ve got to have land-based cables to transmit the data. Of course, getting these cables first installed is often a bit complicated as you need to find and get permission to bury the cable across all sorts of different pieces of land, but, hear me out here, wouldn’t it be convenient if only one entity owned land stretching from Poti, where the cable lands, to Tbilisi, the capital, and beyond. Enter Georgian Railways, which, super-conveniently, is also owned by the Georgian government. It set up another company, creatively named Georgian Railway
Telecom was given ownership of a 16 inch or 40-centimeter strip of land right next to the railway tracks all across the country. In this piece of land, it installed a fiber optic cable to bring the fast internet from the Caucasus Cable System to the rest of the country and even to neighboring countries like Armenia.
This is how Armazi, which has the Poti to Tbilisi railway running through it, also got a fiber optic cable running through it. Also, a shower thought for you, that means that the digital file of my voice has run through Armazi because I certainly have plenty of Georgian viewers. Oh, nobody care? Oh, ok. Now, our 75-year-old Armazi resident, Hayastan Shakarian, like many residents of this area of Georgia, was quite poor back in 2011 so she worked to make some extra cash by scavenging and selling copper.
Wait! the What happened to train’s social and economic mobility? I’ve got to rethink my subtly injected political commentary. On a March 28, 2011, copper-finding expedition, Hayastan started as normal, looking around the forest, then somehow make her way into the area of the train tracks. She probably saw something promising, dug down, and eventually came across a cable. She might have thought this cable included copper and, therefore, somehow, managed to cut it, but at that moment, in a unified collective cry, the entirety of the nation of Armenia went, “no.” That’s because that cable provided, apparently, about 90% of Armenia’s internet. Therefore, for the next twelve hours, the entire nation of 3 million people, with little exception, was without internet—TV stations couldn’t get their news, companies couldn’t send their emails, hospitals couldn’t download patient files, and, perhaps most devastatingly, nobody could watch this article.
Georgia’s internet, meanwhile, was mostly just slowed down a bit as they had other cables running in, but, of course, elsewhere in Armenia everyone panicked, nobody knew what to do, and they couldn’t even go on Twitter to complain.
Eventually, though, the telecom company isolated the issue to Armazi, fixed the cable, and the perpetrator, Hayastan Shakarian, was arrested. So what’s the moral of the story? Hayastan Shakarian comes along and breaks your country’s internet—or if you’re ever on an airplane or don’t want to destroy your data plan.
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