The teenagers who wired Romania

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1:38From the BBC World Service, this is the documentary. I'm tech journalist Andrada Fiscuten and I'm telling the story of young people who rose up after the fall of communism in Romania and grabbed the future of tech with both hands. All this neighborhood that you see now, it was like a spider web. We used to connect cables over the blocks over there. This is Roxana Ardelen. Look at the view. We're on top of a 14-story tower block in Bucharest, Romania. Rain is drizzling down as we look out over rows and rows of high-rises built under communism. What happened in the 90s, nobody put money into the blocks, so everything became so grey.

2:26This is Roxana's old neighbourhood, the district of Pante Limon. Her life on these streets has been shaped by the arrival of the digital world. We were like a family and a little tribe of children. We also shared connection, we shared the internet connection. Roxana is part of a generation of DIYers, improvisers and risk-takers who have helped build a name for one of Europe's poorest countries in the digital world. They are the teenagers who wired Romania and I'll be telling their story from tower blocks across the capital. My friends were coming to my house with their computers and their big monitors.

3:08You've met Roxana, now let's meet Erik Bolanu. It's the 1990s, and Eric and his friends are some of the first people in the country to get their hands on personal computers. And they spend their time working out what they can do on these big, bulky machines. They set them up together in Eric's apartment. I had once, I think, 10 people with 10 computers in my house, plus two mine. We are using the network to play games and have fun. One computer on its own is fun. But join them up with a cable and you have a network. It's not the internet. It's computer to computer. But you can share files with each other and chat.

3:51It's a whole new way of socializing. But in the late 1990s, PCs are heavy. And carrying all those computers up and down flights of stairs is a lot of work. So Eric tries a different way of linking them. I had a friend at the tent floor. I wanted to connect him to my network and he has another friend, the other part of the building and I started to throw cables between my neighbours to cable their computers to the network so playing, chatting, sharing files and so on. But the network is basic. The cables are cheap and they only work in sequence. If one link in the chain breaks, all the network beyond it crashes.

4:40If one of the members would pull out the cable from the computer, the network wouldn't run. So at some point, the network is fine, it's working, but at some point, the network is not working. So what should we do? We started to search where is the problem. And at some point, I think right here, one of the guys says, OK, I'm sorry, my mother is cleaning the house, so it will last for about an hour, and then the signal will come back. Game over for everyone. So the network is growing, but it's all offline. It's just computer-to-computer communication, sharing music, movies, software, and games. But then things get even more exciting.

5:25This connection of the telephone of the internet is going like... Dial-up internet connections arrive, and Roxana and her friends start going online in internet cafes. You could have connection to a different culture, a different way of thinking, something completely different to what's surrounding you. Now, to understand how massive this change is, you have to compare it to life just a few years earlier, when Romania is living under communist rule. Until 1989, Romanians are largely cut off from the West. Very few people are allowed to travel abroad. And interactions with the few foreigners in Romania are not encouraged.

6:13Even a letter being sent abroad would be read by the state. Information was strictly regulated. Until 1989, we had only one program that was airing like two hours per night, and we only hear whatever they wanted to say. Nothing else. Only propaganda. During communism, the media has been the mouthpiece of the state, and the only way people hear unbiased news and learn about their country is by listening illegally to radio from outside Romania. Then, in December 1989, there's an uprising There's a bullet ricocheting Protesters clash with the regime on the streets During the night, I heard some noises outside And I saw a tank making movements in front of the building My aunt and mother was here in Bucharest And they had a bullet passing through the door A crowd storms the state television station Three days later, on Christmas Day, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu is killed by a firing squad.

7:23Communism is over. In the wake of the revolution, campaigner Ion Karamitru is quick to realize this is a new dawn for Romanian media and communications. We were so far from what happened in the world. There is no mass media giving to our people information about political life and the democratic states and so on. Now we have to learn, I think. In the years that followed the 1989 revolution, Romanian society is modernizing fast. It goes from those two hours of state-prescribed television per day to a country with a free press that is opening a window onto the world. and then the internet starts to connect Romanians to the rest of the world in a way that had been unthinkable.

8:12You could see like a bright star in front of you and this connection with the West, let's say. This opened the doors of everything. It was an explosion of freedom but it was a little bit of chaos because you could do anything. You could open a shop without having too much, I don't know, papers or something. People were doing anything they liked. And did all these create unique conditions for your networks? Yes, it created a hunger for communication, for free speech. It came with the need of communication and to be free to share. This had an impact on how we started these networks. In the late 1990s, in the tower blocks of Bucharest, young people are clamoring to be part of this new online world.

9:11But Romania's telecoms infrastructure, that's meant to support it, is basic, to say the least. The phone lines were sharing actually the same line, even they had different numbers. So if I was picking the receiver, I could hear the people if they were talking at that moment. And only one of those households sharing the line can use it at once. You're like, please put the phone down, I'm trying to connect the internet. It's clear things need to improve. And to move beyond dial-up and have a reliable connection at home, not just at an internet cafe, you need a dedicated line. But that's out of reach for most people in the late 90s.

9:58Permanent connection was something like very fancy. The cost was around$200 -$300 per month. It was a business subscription and we couldn't afford to pay this kind of money. That's an expensive internet subscription at the best of times. But in the late 1990s, Romania is grappling with soaring inflation. The price of bread could double in the same day. But in these challenging times, the DIY ethos of the neighborhood networkers comes good. They find a way. They're able to buy one connection and share it over networks between everyone's computers. We put together the money and we had one of these permanent connections.

10:46We've split these costs into tens or hundreds of users, so we could pay like 5, 6 euros each for a subscription. By splitting the costs, suddenly, everyday Romanians have access to far faster Internet than many people in countries far richer. The idea takes off. At the turn of the millennium, more and more people are setting up networks, like Laurentiu Simeon. He's our next connection. So we're driving to Laurentiu. This is a different neighborhood. It's called Drumul Taberei. Laurentiu built a neighborhood network here and he still owns it.

11:30Morning. Morning. Like a lot of Bucharest, Drumul Taberei is made of grids of apartment blocks. So Laurentiu, why have you brought us here? In this intersection between Valle Alomitse Street and the boulevard of Drumultabere, we have the place where we install the first cable and the first hub for our network. And if I look at the building there, there are some cables. Are those cables yours? Yes, somehow are still mine, but we go upstairs and we will see how the things are looking from above. Excellent, let's go! Laurentiu takes me to the top floor of the building. We push open a hatch. As we step out, we see the skyline of Bucharest all around us.

12:26Wow, this is high! Hello! Hello, Bucharest! This is the place where the thing started, with cables going all around the block to different windows, drilling in the apartment in order to get these wires to the computers. And Laurentiu has his work cut out. Everyone wants a connection. When we started actually to grow was the moment when we had a permanent internet connection. We also had something to provide the internet access, which at that time was very valuable. And what has begun as a small network built by friends who just want to play video games together is growing into a business, an internet provider connecting multiple apartment blocks.

13:23We just enter in that block, go start to install and one more neighbor go out, come on, bring me a cable inside. Or another one stopping us on the stairs going up. Are you installing the cable? We want also internet. We are the apartment 55. Okay, someone will come to you in short time. And in that day we were installing an entire block. They're working it out as they go and getting more ambitious. When we made the first step on conquering the neighborhood, the first cable was through this block and the second one was that one from the other side over the small park. Laurentio is pointing to another apartment block besides us.

14:13To run a cable between the two looks really difficult to do. There's quite a bit of a gap between this building we're on and the building you said you first connected to the internet. How did you manage to get a cable? We were lowering the cable to the ground from one block and from the other block we were lowering a rope. We just put them together somewhere between them. One guy took one cable, the other one took the rope, put them together and the rope was dropped, taken on the other block. Then the cable came and we secured it and that's it. Connected. Connecting people. But dropping a cable down one side of the building, along the ground, and then up the other side means you need a lot of wire.

15:05How did you find cables? We got scraps of cables from big rollers of cables, and we used these ones. Nothing is going to waste, and improvisation is the name of the game. On some major boulevards, they stop traffic in the dead of the night just long enough to get their cables across. On other streets, electric tramwires mean they can't lower cables down. They have to keep them high. They need a quirkier solution. And Roxana is the maestro at that. It's funny how we used to connect them because we use a potato. The potato, Roxana's secret weapon. We used to make a hole with a screwdriver in it.

15:52You pass the cable through the potato and then you throw it to the second building and hope to score. It was like baseball in a way. so the potato was it all ruled and then when we had money we didn't use the potato anymore potato was the beginning when you're looking back to those days through today's eyes do you think that um it was a risky endeavor or or not it was very dangerous but i don't know how i survived the 90s because when, for example, when we went to a rooftop like we are now, there were places that you have to go like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible on the edge of something with our feet not so far apart.

16:50So if I think about it now, I'm unimaginable. Very, very dangerous. This is the documentary from the BBC World Service.

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17:58I'm Andrada Fiskoten and you're listening to The Teenagers Who Wired Romania, the story of young people who build DIY internet networks that made access affordable and fast. It's the early 2000s and the skyline of Bucharest is laced with cables strung from rooftop to rooftop in a vast, improvised web. We're with network builder Laurentiu and we're following the trail of his internet cables to see where they lead back to. Like most of the blocks in Bucharest, this is a 10-store building. The 11th floor was used in the past for keeping the clothes from drying. It was like a laundry room, Laundry rooms, cleaning rooms, whatever.

18:49Then you came here and you basically took over the... Took over a corner of it in order to install the first equipment that should connect to the apartments. Using cables outside of the building because it was very easy to install them. And there are still some cables coming through the window. It feels like there are 20 cables, quite large ones. Yeah, it's enough to fill the entire bathtub. It's amazing to see, whatever the obstacle, wherever they need the cables to go, there's always a solution. We're just putting outside and going through the windows with the cables, drilling near the window or in the frame of the window or whatever, because there was not a specific way.

19:39So we were essentially a bunch of teenagers drilling holes into these walls without any permission and without much adult supervision. It was a wild, wild west. We just saw an opportunity and then did whatever we wanted to do, right? Yes, that's right. We did actually whatever we wanted to do. Maybe with some administrators there came some difficulties. Building administrators hold the keys to the rooftops and service rooms. And as you might imagine, they aren't always on board with all the holes being drilled for cables. It was something new and, you know, the people are more conservative. It's not allowed, even if there were no regulations.

20:27And we used all the time the people who wanted to connect to our network against them. They get the people who want the internet to push back. They tell them, let them do it. We want the internet. Over in Bucharest's Colentina neighborhood, I asked Eric if he's had these battles. Were there people who opposed the network? Yes, yes, yes. We had a lot of building administrators. And when we started to pull the cables inside the buildings, some of them asked us what they were doing here. What's this cable for? Okay, it's for internet. What is internet? We have cable. What do we need? Internet. we have TV cable.

21:13Internet is for you know computers communicating oh I don't need this you are not allowed to install new cables in the building we have enough cables we don't want hosts and cables and other things on the wall so you are not allowed so because of this we used to put equipments inside the apartments so you are not allowing me to come with the cable on the common part of the building okay i will go directly to the window and then from that window i will go directly to that window and this is how we started to pull cables directly between the windows so these things happened down on the street there are poles built to carry telecom and electricity cables but now they are being weighed down with wires for the networks.

22:08In many places this might be against the law but in Romania in the early 2000s the regulations haven't kept up. Having a lack of legal framework we were not like legal we were not also illegal but we were seeing like yes people that are doing weird things on the walls. Did the police interfere with your work at different times? Not so many times. Usually when they were seeing pulling cables on the poles, they were asking us if we have papers. Sometimes we couldn't show the papers, so they said, OK, you should go home. We preferred to work during the nights because it was no traffic, no police, no whatever.

23:00And this legal limbo is a golden opportunity. Without the regulation, you can do whatever you want. And even if you install them in the past, nobody will request afterwards, remove them. And many big companies made the networks like this. They just installed it without regulations. All the companies did the same. Networks are springing up all over Bucharest, 1400 by 2006. With all this competition, rivalries are building. We were searching all the time, like in a war. You search all the time solution in order to improve your connection. And was there a lot of tension between overlapping networks?

23:46Everything was fine till we start to have a group of guys entering, ganging up on the next block. And started competition discussing who will get on the next block, who will give the best offer for this connection and so on. When we start passing one next to the other ones in the same blocks, we start also to cut some cables between. Oh. And there's competition from all sides. Larger internet providers are muscling in and trying to increase their share of the market by taking over the smaller businesses. When the company started to buy, some of the people decided to sell their networks to get some money instead of competing the other networks.

24:42Slowly, slowly, we acquire some clients. We acquire some small companies. Fortunately for Eric, his company is one of the bigger neighborhood networks and he starts to take over local rivals. How many clients did you have at peak? 5 ,000, around 5 ,000. And the appeal of the neighborhood networks is how fast they are. At a time when most countries are still using copper cabling, Eric and others adopt a more modern approach. We started to implement fiber in our networks. This became an advantage for us because building fiber networks allowed us to deliver high speeds. But as Romania prepares to join the European Union in 2007, this makeshift infrastructure starts to cause problems.

25:40and there's a push to clean up the wires. The poles started to be buried in cables and usually the operators didn't remove all the unused cables from the poles. So the municipality started this project to allow every operator to build a network underground without need to dig. So it was a good thing. but it comes with costs. Underground cabling is the future. It's tidy and safe, but because of the costs, a lot of the neighborhood networks come to the same conclusion. I know a lot of people with small networks in the same approach. Okay, when they come to force me to bury the cables, then I will stop delivering services.

26:36So today, the cables across the skyline are largely gone. And so too are many of the people running networks. Roxana has left to work in film. And Eric and Laurentiu are among less than 300 small providers still going. Competition with larger companies is just so tough. The three big players here, they have like 98 % of the market in internet connections. And yeah, this is not a good thing. But the impact of those neighborhood networks lives on. Romania is a digital success story, a country punching above its weight. Highly affordable, fast connections are something people here simply expect. And today, it's a powerhouse for software development.

27:26And all this might never have happened if it wasn't for the teenagers who wired Romania. This happened because of the networks and the speed of the networks and I think we helped somehow to this developing of technologies and our fast internet also attracts many big tech companies in Romania and thousands of employees from all over. So a lot of people learned how to use software and learn how to code by using your networks. For sure there were. So after five decades of communism in which the country was closed, the borders were closed, there was very little interaction with the foreigners, finally everyone could have access to the wider world without crossing the border.

28:30Many people open in their mind a way, their way for life by having the fast internet connections. The people were discovering the world somehow.

28:49You've been listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. It was presented by me, Andrada Fiscuten.