Side streets and easements are cicso machinery that come off the backbone. There are major internet traffic highways, last I heard like 17 major hubs, then thousands of pieces of Cisco hardware off of that.
The surface streets would be things like LANS and WANS.
You have to know how the internet was designed. It was designed to be a communication network that could survive a nuclear strike. If a major internet highway or hub was down (or vaporized) the routing would still be possible through lower levels of routers.
Internet Exchange Points. The communications traffic on the Internet backbone is exchanged at large Internet Exchange Points (IXP), sometimes called Network Access Points (NAP) or Metropolitan Area Exchanges (MAE), constituting the top level of the Internet network topology. The first five large NAP's in North America were established in the 1990's in Chicago, New Jersey, San Francisco, San Jose, and Washington, D.C. The following sites maintain current indexes of IXPs, many of which provide statistics and graphs of the performance of their major nodes:
Thank you for your explanation. I’m no IT person and this is your area of expertise. Now, let me ask since this is your field. You’ve discussed the main structure, which in itself is huge. However, I suppose my concern is in data collecting and suspending of service. How would this new ‘take over’ use their central power to cause disruptions?