If you enjoyed this piece, be sure to read "Mother Earth Mother Board", written by Stephenson and published in Wired in December 1996. It's a long and fascinating look at the world of undersea cabling, and it's chock-full of super-interesting facts.
Excellent, I was hoping that this article serves as a kind of precursor or preview of material that Neal is working on. Given that undersea cabling is discussed in some detail in Cryptonomicon (published three years later in 1999) then that means we can probably look forward to interesting space travel discussed in Neal's next tale. Anathem touched on a Project Orion type spacecraft, but this article is definitely covering a different slant.
Full giant extremely-long and interesting article here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html