Astranet

Structure

Switchboards

There are only two ways to send information between star systems in reasonable timeframes (i.e. arbitrarily faster than light): beaming encoded light through wormholes using an ansible array, or sending physical data storage on a warpship. The former option is vastly preferred by all documented civilizations for its convenience in matters of time and energy, but it does mean that wormhole links must be established and maintained between the origin and destination. With literally hundreds of inhabited star systems across the breadth of known space and a finite bandwidth through the very small ansible wormholes, the switchboard hubs are large and extremely power-hungry facilities that transfer exabytes of data according to priority flagging. A given system will have only a few interstellar switchboards, with data received and disseminated across the system by smaller local ansible hubs and laser relays.

Universal Gateway Protocol

The astranet as a whole is a miracle of massively coordinated data compatibility. Thousands of technologists have spent decades upon decades devising protocols that allow mutual intelligibility between data sources from multiple independently-evolved infospheres. This effort is coordinated and spearheaded by both the Coalition Communications Commission and the independent organization called the Astranet Task Force —the ATF does the work to develop and maintain the astranet's virtual infrastructure, while the CCC publishes the ATF protocols as Coalition-wide standards. The modern culmination of this partnership is the Universal Gateway Protocol: a flexible set of instructions for converting data between any format via a basic binary language in a matrix of sequential primes.

Uses

The astranet is one of the infrastructural backbones of interstellar meta-civilization as we know it. Near-instantaneous transfer of information across the vast voids that separate inhabited star systems allows for a more cohesive, continuous cultural exchange between the scattered islands of civilization. Information of all kinds is passed through burrowed spacetime from world to world, from simple social fads to essential navigation data. Omnipedia itself utilizes the astranet: localized copies of the full dataset are stored in each major system, while retrieval and cross-version edits are conducted across ansible connections.