Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

In his first book, "Tubes" the journalist Andrew Blum (a technology writer for Wired, The New Yorker, etc ), brings us an accessible book about the Internet. Other books talk about the internet as if it were some ethereal place, the cloud, the net, cyberspace, etc. Blum attempts to capture the Internet's physical reality in order for every user to understand and visualize what it really means to go to the internet. In part, because he really does go to the Internet. Not through his computer, not via some "Fantastic Voyage" where he shrinks to the size of an information bit and shoots down the copper and glass fiber connections of the internet to visit all of its body parts. But rather by walking out his back door, following his ethernet cable, and tracking down one by one the buildings, facilities, and infrastructure where the bits and bytes physically go. They can't really go into a cloud can they? The internet must exist in physical space...and so begins his journey to the "Center of the Internet" to track down these physical spaces.Unlike science fiction stories, Blum's journey to the "Center of the Internet" was both real and successful. He found it. Which is why his book is so good. His discoveries at the very core of the internet provide us the correct context to understand not only what it means to be on the information superhighway, but the correct way to use it. When you finish, the internet will no longer be a mystery. Now, it does take some thought as you are reading. This is not a book that you simply read and the answers manifest before you. And it helps if you have already considered where all these bits and bytes go. For one, there are no pictures. This is a shame because Blum starts by talking to individuals who make maps of internet and because he organizes his research into chunks that could easily be strung together with a couple of simple diagrams. But the information is there to build this diagram in your mind...but you have to think it through while mapping for yourself the things he talks about. It helps to keep Google Earth up and running while you read.Blum also chooses not to write a highly technical description of the routers, and servers along with the internet protocol that seamlessly work together to provide the illusion of an ethereal cyberspace. Again, he delivers just enough that you will want to type internet protocol (IPv4 or IPv6) into Wikipedia and then swim as deep into the material as you need to go to fully understand how bits and bytes are thrown around in an orderly fashion using the first true genius of the internet. Without the invention of internet protocol there is no internet, so it's a concept worth understanding.Later in the book he briefly mentions an procedure anyone can do from their computer known as trace-route. He doesn't tell you what to do in the text but it's easy. In Windows Vista go to the START menu and choose Run. Then type CMD into prompt field and return to open an MSDOS Window. Now you're closer to the guts of your computer (and hence the internet) than most of us ever want to be. At the command prompt type in "tracert" followed by a space and your favorite internet website...like Google or Facebook. If you want to go to Europe pick something with an .eu like [...] for instance. Then press return. Bang...the bits and bytes leaving your computer are mapped through the entire physical network to their destination right before your eyes. No more mystery. Why Blum chose to let us figure this out for ourselves was a balancing act he must have done with his editors. Since it reduces the technical jargon in the text and but still compels us to do it ourselves, it makes for a richer experience.If you chose to run a "tracert" look through the list of places that pop up one by one as the journey from your computer to its destination moves forward. You will see your local router, then the router of your internet service provider. Soon you will be out on the fiber headed towards an huge internet exchange. From there you will be off to perhaps several more exchanges, and if you choose to go to Europe, rocketing through an undersea cable to an exchange in London or other major city. Then it's off the the destination where your website is hosted on a server, perhaps at some giant data facility like Google or Facebook, but could just as easily be the server in the basement of someone selling rare porcelain figures. It's really quite simple, but also really quite fascinating. Andrew Blum has produced the right combination of history, technology, and geekdom to open this ubiquitous world to everyone.One question remains...who is paying for it all? Blum fails to all but crack open the door to the financial side of this world...and it's not clear why he backs away from this topic. Since he is only talking about the infrastructure we can skip who pays for the free services we use such as Facebook and Google, they have their own elaborate finances that seem to deal with advertisers which pay for their colossal data centers with thousands and thousands of servers. Then a big portion of the rest of the infrastructure consists of the communications lines, like undersea cables, and the internet exchanges. The cables are easy, they are paid for by investors, and the cables themselves are a resource that can be purchased or most likely leased. We pay our ISP, who in turn builds the network close to home and into the back of our house. What remains is the huge internet exchanges owned by companies like Equinix. They have a separate model...and it is this model...and the ability to make money from this model, that creates the internet we know it today. It is the core...the center of the internet. And worth a journey to Ashburn Virginia to see, if not simply to drive by the buildings where it exists. Then to point to and say to your kids in the car, "behold, the internet!". Without that building in Ashburn nothing works. There would be no internet. So who is paying Equinix? Someone definitely is...and that is the second true genius of the internet and the most compelling part of Blum's work. As it turns out most of the relationships around an internet exchange are not physical at all, they are human. And where human's meet in a marketplace, money changes hands. Equinix simply providing this marketplace, like a flea market...without which there is no internet.I for one thank Andrew Blum for taking me on this journey to the center of the internet, this marketplace, with him. I'm giving Tubes 5 stars. It has flaws...but it's a must read for everyone who thinks they are connected to the internet. After they read this book, they will be inter-connected with the internet even more.

The Internet has become a routine fixture in the lives of billions of people, the vast majority of whom have hardly any idea how it works or what physical infrastructure allows them to access and share information almost instantaneously around the globe, abolishing, in a sense, the very concept of distance. And yet the Internet exists—if it didn't, you wouldn't be able to read this. So, if it exists, where is it, and what is it made of?In this book, the author embarks upon a quest to trace the Internet from that tangle of cables connected to the router behind his couch to the hardware which enables it to communicate with its peers worldwide. The metaphor of the Internet as a cloud—simultaneously everywhere and nowhere—has become commonplace, and yet as the author begins to dig into the details, he discovers the physical Internet is nothing like a cloud: it is remarkably centralised (a large Internet exchange or “peering location” will tend grow ever larger, since networks want to connect to a place where the greatest number of other networks connect), often grungy (when pulling fibre optic cables through century-old conduits beneath the streets of Manhattan, one's mind turns more to rats than clouds), and anything but decoupled from the details of geography (undersea cables must choose a route which minimises risk of breakage due to earthquakes and damage from ship anchors in shallow water, while taking the shortest route and connecting to the backbone at a location which will provide the lowest possible latency).The author discovers that while much of the Internet's infrastructure is invisible to the layman, it is populated, for the most part, with people and organisations open and willing to show it off to visitors. As an amateur anthropologist, he surmises that to succeed in internetworking, those involved must necessarily be skilled in networking with one another. A visit to a NANOG gathering introduces him to this subculture and the retail politics of peering.Finally, when non-technical people speak of “the Internet”, it isn't just the interconnectivity they're thinking of but also the data storage and computing resources accessible via the network. These also have a physical realisation in the form of huge data centres, sited based upon the availability of inexpensive electricity and cooling (a large data centre such as those operated by Google and Facebook may consume on the order of 50 megawatts of electricity and dissipate that amount of heat). While networking people tend to be gregarious bridge-builders, data centre managers view themselves as defenders of a fortress and closely guard the details of their operations from outside scrutiny. When Google was negotiating to acquire the site for their data centre in The Dalles, Oregon, they operated through an opaque front company called “Design LLC”, and required all parties to sign nondisclosure agreements. To this day, if you visit the facility, there's nothing to indicate it belongs to Google; on the second ring of perimeter fencing, there's a sign, in Gothic script, that says “voldemort industries”—don't be evil! (p. 242) (On p. 248 it is claimed that the data centre site is deliberately obscured in Google Maps. Maybe it once was, but as of this writing it is not. From above, apart from the impressive power substation, it looks no more exciting than a supermarket chain's warehouse hub.) The author finally arranges to cross the perimeter, get his retina scanned, and be taken on a walking tour around the buildings from the outside. To cap the visit, he is allowed inside to visit—the lunchroom. The food was excellent. He later visits Facebook's under-construction data centre in the area and encounters an entirely different culture, so perhaps not all data centres are Morlock territory.The author comes across as a quintessential liberal arts major (which he was) who is alternately amused by the curious people he encounters who understand and work with actual things as opposed to words, and enthralled by the wonder of it all: transcending space and time, everywhere and nowhere, “free” services supported by tens of billions of dollars of power-gobbling, heat-belching infrastructure—oh, wow! He is also a New York collectivist whose knee-jerk reaction is “public, good; private, bad” (notwithstanding that the build-out of the Internet has been almost exclusively a private sector endeavour). He waxes poetic about the city-sponsored (paid for by grants funded by federal and state taxpayers plus loans) fibre network that The Dalles installed which, he claims, lured Google to site its data centre there. The slightest acquaintance with economics or, for that matter, arithmetic, demonstrates the absurdity of this. If you're looking for a site for a multi-billion dollar data centre, what matters is the cost of electricity and the climate (which determines cooling expenses). Compared to the price tag for the equipment inside the buildings, the cost of running a few (or a few dozen) kilometres of fibre is lost in the round-off. In fact, we know, from p. 235 that the 27 kilometre city fibre run cost US$1.8 million, while Google's investment in the data centre is several billion dollars.These quibbles aside, this is a fascinating look at the physical substrate of the Internet. Even software people well-acquainted with the intricacies of TCP/IP may have only the fuzziest comprehension of where a packet goes after it leaves their site, and how it gets to the ultimate destination. This book provides a tour, accessible to all readers, of where the Internet comes together, and how counterintuitive its physical realisation is compared to how we think of it logically.

This book was a bit of a disappointment to me, to be honest. It is far too long for what it is, which is the story of the author’s trip around the world to try to “see” the Internet. It’s a shame to say it, but if this was the sum total of the trip, the project should have been abandoned rather than published. Or the author should at least have said up front that, while he did have a nice time touring around, he wasn’t actually much the wiser regarding how the internet works, apart from the obvious point that there are a lot of tubes involved.The author’s recent book about the story of weather forecasting is much better, if you’re at all interested in that sort of thing. So at least I can recommend one of his books.

Not an easy read, but absolutely fascinating contents. The author basically tries to answer the question How does the Internet work? How does an email get from your computer to the other side of the world? Where do the wires go when they disappear down into the ground? Who designs and looks after and pays for all the hardware? Did you know that datacentres (eg. where Amazon and Facebook and YouTube etc store all their data) use so much electricity that they mostly are located right next to power stations?The book is full of interesting (to us geeks) and unexpected facts and stories. It explains stuff that most people don't even think about. It is a great reference book. But, it loses a star rating because the writing style is quite (sorry) boring.

Yes, I admit it, I am a total geek and this sort of thing delights me ! It is a thorough exploration of how the internet developed and it's infrastructure. If like me the new reader had no real awareness of just how the internet exists this will be a revelation. I had a notion of how it worked but Tubes showed me otherwise ! I'm now actually quite thrilled by thinking of how all my web activity is conveyed and routed around the globe. Your view of the internet will be forever changed and you will truly appreciate the magnitude of it's significance after reading Tubes.

I stumbled upon this book and bought it on impulse. From the start it has this nosing around style, which if your familiar with Louis Theroux, is not everyone's cup of tea, but I like it. It goes on a great journey technically and geographically and tries really hard to remain grounded and accessible, which it does. I like technical stuff explained so that it's understandable and this author achieves this. I can imagine a lot of tech explanations that required more detail just got dropped in the edit, so don't expect this book to provide insight beyond where the internet is.

Starts off with you realising how much of a tube you are yourself. Of course the internet is a series of tubes, of course the internet isn't completely wireless. Of course my internet being down doesn't mean THE INTERNET is down. Very interesting summary of the substance of the thing. Can get a bit laboured talking about the old computers than took up a room in the 50s but overall it's a very illuminating tale.