How Chicago became one of the nation's most digital cities

Chicago is one of the half-dozen key vertebrae in the nation's digital backbone because it lies at the center of many of the fiber optic cables that stretch between New York and California, the country's major connection points to the rest of the world via cables under the oceans.

Chicago has the third-biggest fiber optic capacity of any metro area in the country, behind New York and Washington. And three of the world's largest data centers are in Chicago or its suburbs. The same combination of geography and economics that elevated Chicago into a national center of infrastructure-dependent industries such as commodity trading, transportation and manufacturing in the 19th and 20th centuries now contributes to its pre-eminence in 21st-century digital infrastructure. The city's digital tubes are tomorrow's waterways, rail lines, highways and airports. "Things go to where things are," says Hunter Newby, CEO of New York-based Allied Fiber, one of two companies laying fiber from the East Coast to Chicago to meet demand from financial services and wireless companies. "Where there is manufacturing and industry, there are power plants and distribution, which cost a lot of money to build." "Chicago is by far the center of railroad tracks in the U.S.," says Chris Gladwin, CEO of Cleversafe Inc., a data storage company based in the West Loop. "If you're hosting a server, Chicago is near the population center in the U.S. It will have the lowest average latency (lag time) to the rest of the U.S." But the region can't take its position for granted.