ABSTRACT
The US telecommunications firm WorldCom/MCI has built an optic fibre network covering only the core of central London. Only 125 km long, it carries fully 20 per cent of the whole of the United Kingdom’s international telecommunications traffic. This is only one of a rapidly emerging global archipelago of urban optic fibre grids concentrated in the urban cores of the world’s fifty financial capitals in Asia, Europe, Australasia, and North and South America. Such networks serve no other places. A widening global web of transoceanic and transcontinental fibre networks interconnects these high capacity urban grids, which are carefully located to serve the most communications-intensive international firms. However, whilst the cores of global financial centre spaces reach out to the globe with unprecedented power, increasing efforts are being made to ‘filter’ their connections with their host cities. In London, for example, the so-called ‘ring of steel’ supports electronic surveillance systems and armed guards on every entry point into the financial district. Cars entering have their number plates read automatically. Stolen cars are detected within three seconds. And the potential for the facial recognition of drivers, by linking automatically with digitised photographs on national licence records, exists in the system and has already been tested.
