- Blum, Andrew.
Tubes.
New York: HarperCollins, 2012.
ISBN 978-0-06-199493-7.
-
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.
In the Kindle edition, end-notes are bidirectionally
linked to the text, but the index is just a list of page numbers. Since
the Kindle edition does include real page numbers, you can type in the
number from the index, but that's hardly as convenient as books where
items in the index are directly linked to the text. Citations of Internet
documents in the end notes are given as URLs, but not linked; the reader
must copy and paste them into a browser's address bar in order to access
the documents.
September 2012 