Book summary “Tubes”: summary

Introduction

You tend to think of the internet as an invisible cloud. You imagine a weightless ether existing everywhere and nowhere at once. When you send an email or stream a video, you rarely consider where the data actually travels.

Andrew Blum recognized this disconnect when a construction crew severed the fiber-optic cable outside his apartment. He realized that the intangible digital world depends entirely on a tangible, physical infrastructure.

The Internet is not an abstract cloud but a physical infrastructure of real buildings, cables, and machines mapped onto familiar geography.

In Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Blum traces this hidden network from local exchange points to subterranean conduits and transoceanic cables. You will discover how routers, data centers, and marine engineering make global connectivity possible.

The book answers several key questions about the digital age:

• Where do internet cables actually go beneath your city streets?
• How do massive amounts of data cross the Atlantic Ocean?
• What physical spaces house the servers that form the cloud?
• Who owns and manages the physical machinery of the web?

1. The Physical Map and Local Interconnection

Popular culture treats the digital age as placeless. You rely on an abstract ether called the cloud. Yet the Internet relies entirely on physical locations like data centers, cable landing stations, and underground conduits.

The Internet is not a placeless cloud or abstract ether, but a fixed physical infrastructure composed of real buildings, wires, and machines.

A squirrel chewed through a cable modem wire outside the author's Brooklyn home. This accident temporarily disrupted his internet connection and revealed the physical fragility of the network. Two billion people use the Internet in some form every day.

The Map and Cartography

Market research firms map the physical infrastructure of global telecommunications. They compile capacity data and trace actual network routes. Cartographers at firms like TeleGeography gather data directly from telecom executives. They verify routes using traceroute tools to map the world's undersea cables and network backbones.

Markus Krisetya traveled to a printing press in Milwaukee. He oversaw the final color calibration and production of TeleGeography's global undersea cable map. The Global Internet Geography annual report costs 5,495 dollars. A printed TeleGeography map costs 250 dollars. By the end of 2010, routing tables contained four hundred thousand entries.

Local Infrastructure and Exchanges

Local internet access relies on unremarkable downtown buildings. Regional service providers physically interconnect there with wholesale backbone carriers in modest local offices.

Regional internet service providers colocate equipment in modest local buildings. They run cables through shared utility chases to connect with major wholesale providers like Cogent and Time Warner.

Jon Auer guided the author through the dingy basement and hallways of an old Milwaukee athletic club building constructed in 1901. He showed the Cisco routers and cable bundles that feed internet to twenty-five thousand customers relying on his company for internet access.

2. Packet Switching and Metropolitan Expansion

The Internet expanded rapidly through packet switching, standardized protocols, and commercial exchange hubs.

Origins of the Internet

Packet switching breaks data down into efficient small chunks rather than a continuous stream. Leonard Kleinrock published the first paper on packet switching in 1961 while he was a graduate student at MIT. Developed independently by Donald Davies and Paul Baran, packet switching became one of the foundational technical concepts of the Internet, allowing efficient data transmission across distributed networks.

The physical birth of the ARPANET began with the delivery of the very first Interface Message Processor to UCLA in 1969. A Honeywell DDP-516 minicomputer customized by Bolt, Beranek and Newman was shipped by air freight to Boelter Hall under the supervision of Leonard Kleinrock, serving as the first node of the experimental network. The Honeywell DDP-516 weighed 900 pounds and cost $80,000 in 1969, which equals $500,000 in today's dollars. The Department of Defense contract for Bolt, Beranek and Newman cost $1 million, while ARPA funding supported forty grad students and staff at UCLA for $200,000.

On a Saturday in Labor Day weekend 1969, computer science graduate students gathered in the courtyard of Boelter Hall with champagne to welcome IMP #1 arriving from Boston.

Commercial Infrastructure

The adoption of TCP/IP on New Year's Day 1983 standardized network communications and created a true internetwork. By switching from Network Control Protocol to Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, diverse and disconnected computer networks adopted a single universal language, permanently fixing the Internet's distributed, decentralized structure. System administrators stayed at their desks on New Year's Eve 1983 to manage the cutover, issuing I SURVIVED THE TCP/IP TRANSITION commemorative buttons.

The Internet grew from 15 networks of autonomous systems in 1982 to 35,000 autonomous systems by 2011. Computer counts surged across the decades:

• 2,000 computers had Internet access in fall 1985;
• 30,000 computers joined by the end of 1987;
• 159,000 computers operated by the end of 1989;
• 20 percent of American adults used the Internet by 1997;
• 2 billion people used the Internet by 2011.

MAE-East served as the crucial early commercial crossroads and de facto gateway for the expansion of the Internet. Created by MFS Datanet in the Virginia suburbs, MAE-East functioned as a Metropolitan Area Exchange where independent commercial network providers could physically connect their routers to exchange traffic without using government-run backbones. Bob Collet of Sprint, Marty Schoffstall of PSI, and Rick Adams of UUNET committed to the hub during a lunch meeting in 1992 at the Tortilla Factory in Herndon, Virginia.

Within a couple of years of its opening, 50 percent of all world Internet traffic passed through MAE-East. Steve Feldman faced constant congestion issues at MAE-East as traffic doubled every year and the hub relocated from an office suite to a basement parking garage at 1919 Gallows Road.

3. The Rise of Carrier-Neutral Data Centers

Silicon Valley acts as a physical business cluster where the proximity of talent, expertise, and venture capital drives Internet innovation and infrastructure development. An economic geographer views this region as a business cluster that concentrates talent, expertise, and immense financial backing. This environment fosters a collective belief in the limitless potential of technology and creates a physical hub where key pieces of the Internet are built.

Leonard Kleinrock recorded the first host-to-host communication at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Google started in a garage nearby, and Mark Zuckerberg moved Facebook to a Palo Alto sublet. The Facebook campus in Menlo Park spans a fifty-seven-acre campus, while Palo Alto sits thirty-five miles away from San Francisco.

Evolution of Internet Exchanges

Early Internet exchange points like MAE-East suffered from congestion and conflicts of interest because they were controlled by traditional telecom companies. Brian Reid of Digital Equipment Corporation proposed connecting networks directly in a neutral environment where companies paid rent for square footage and untariffted connections rather than paying per unit of traffic.

Carrier-neutral internet exchanges and telecom hotels created secure environments for massive network interconnections.

Digital Equipment Corporation invested internal funds to set up the Palo Alto Internet Exchange at 529 Bryant Street, a former telephone switching office. The PAIX building sold for $75 million in 1998, and Equinix later paid $689 million in cash and stock to purchase Switch & Data, which included the PAIX.

Directly connecting networks inside a central facility eliminates the need to route data through third parties, lowering costs and increasing efficiency. As backbone owners, regional service providers, and major content platforms all gather in one location, the usefulness of the facility scales exponentially. Over a hundred networks, including Microsoft, Facebook, Google, AT&T, and various international telecoms, established points of presence at the PAIX and Equinix facilities, generating ten thousand Internetwork connections or cross-connects in the PAIX building.

Jay Adelson founded Equinix to build a global chain of neutral telecom hotels that provide consistent, secure environments for network engineers to interconnect. Recognizing that virtual internet traffic requires a robust physical infrastructure, Adelson envisioned standardized data centers globally offering neutral ground, robust backup power, and dedicated perks for network engineers while avoiding traditional carrier monopolies. After missing out on acquiring the PAIX, Adelson raised $12.5 million in venture capital from Microsoft and Cisco to found Equinix and expand into new regions, ultimately operating about one hundred Equinix locations worldwide.

The Ashburn Data Center

To escape the congestion and planning restrictions of traditional urban hubs like Tysons Corner, Equinix placed its new facility in the farmland of Loudoun County near Dulles Airport. Local officials actively assisted by providing rights-of-way for trenching fiber directly to the building, transforming a rural area into a major global connectivity hub. Fledgling Equinix bought land wedged between Waxpool Road and disused railroad tracks in Ashburn, eventually expanding the campus to cover hundreds of thousands of square feet.

The Ashburn site sits three miles away from the Dulles Airport runways, and by early 2012 the Equinix Ashburn complex reached seven hundred thousand square feet in total size.

Equinix facilities are packed with high-end routers, redundant power supplies, backup diesel generators, and massive chillers to offset extreme heat. Overhead cable management systems organize diverse pathways, ranging from yellow fiber-optic patch cords to thick multi-strand innerducts operated by telecom carriers. Dave Morgan and Eric Troyer guided tours through the man-trap security vestibules, Carrier Row, and Fiber Vaults of the Ashburn facility to demonstrate the physical reality of network junctions.

A single Equinix building requires ten megawatts of power capacity at full capacity, and a single innerduct contains up to 864 tightly bonded fibers alongside standardized 19-inch data center racks.

4. Global Exchanges and Network Robustness

Major commercial exchanges route enormous volumes of daily traffic through redundant physical pathways.

Capitalizing the word Internet highlights its physical reality as a singular, touchable place rather than merely an abstract medium. Wired.com changed its house style to a lowercase 'internet' back in 2004, while the author deliberately retains the capital letter to emphasize its physical tangibility.

Network Architecture

Internet exchanges act as regional or global hubs that reduce costs and increase routing efficiency by directly connecting disparate networks. Known as IXs, these entities can be physical brick-and-mortar buildings or organizations that facilitate direct interconnections between networks, bypassing the inefficiency of sending local traffic through distant major backbones. In Minnesota, two local networks historically routed internal traffic all the way through Chicago until regional coordination mechanisms helped keep local traffic local.

The physical geography of the world dictates the location of Internet hubs, meaning network growth follows existing transportation and trade routes. Analyst Alan Mauldin pointed out that Spain will never be a major network hub because it is a peninsula, proving that geography dictates network destiny. Well-designed physical Internet infrastructure is inherently robust, relying on heavy redundancy rather than absolute secrecy for security. Operators of critical network facilities are surprisingly open to visitors because underlying protocols ensure traffic automatically routes around single-point failures. The greatest threats are physical accidents rather than targeted espionage. A seventy-five-year-old grandmother in the country of Georgia accidentally sliced through a buried fiber-optic cable with a shovel, knocking Armenia offline for twelve hours.

Core Facilities

Massive commercial exchanges handle enormous volumes of daily traffic through high-speed core switches housed within secure commercial data centers. Frankfurt's DE-CIX reached a peak traffic record of eight hundred gigabits per second, managed via Brocade MLX-32 core routing equipment.

The stability and expansion of the Internet depend on human relationships and negotiations forged within a tight-knit community of network operators. Network operators gather at thrice-annual meetings of the North American Network Operators' Group, known as NANOG, in places like Austin, Texas. When major networks sever their peering connections, portions of the global Internet become temporarily partitioned and cut off from each other. In a 2008 de-peering dispute, Sprint stopped peering with Cogent for three days, cutting off 3.3 percent of global Internet addresses and stranding entities like the US Department of Justice and NASA.

The Amsterdam Internet Exchange leveraged Dutch trading traditions and progressive right-of-way legislation for fiber laying to establish itself as a premier digital crossroads. The Netherlands passed a law in 1998 requiring landowners to provide a right-of-way for private networks to lay fiber-optic cables and share construction costs, leading to an abundance of redundant pathways.

5. Routers, Conduits, and Historic Telecommunication Hubs

Modern internet connectivity relies on heavy routing machinery, historical underground conduits, and art deco buildings.

Andrew Blum explores a Brocade MLX-32 router at the company's San Jose headquarters. The machine processes massive traffic volumes through specific functional modules.

Par Westesson demonstrated the router internals at Brocade's San Jose laboratory by showing an SFP+ optical module capable of processing ten billion bits per second. An unimpeded bit takes five nanoseconds to cross a three-foot cube router.

The Brocade MLX-32 can hold well over a hundred optical modules. You can trace its internal architecture through four core parts:

• the chassis for gross structure;
• the backplane acting as a fixed-path routing labyrinth;
• line cards making logical routing decisions;
• optical modules that translate electrical signals into light pulses.

Inside the Router

Underground telecommunications infrastructure relies on historical conduit networks established long before modern internet fiber. Fiber-optic contractors in Manhattan run heavy cables through underground conduit systems owned by Empire City Subway, a Verizon subsidiary established in 1891.

Brian Seales and Eddie Diaz of the Hugh O'Kane Electric Company installed twelve hundred feet of Lightower fiber beneath Broadway by pulling it through Empire City manholes using a truck winch and soap lubricant.

Historical Telecommunications Hubs

Buildings like 60 Hudson Street and 32 Avenue of the Americas in New York became major internet hubs because they were originally constructed as telegraph and long-distance telephone central offices. William McGowan of MCI discovered unused clay conduits between 60 Hudson Street and 32 Avenue of the Americas, establishing a beachhead that turned 60 Hudson into a major hub.

Four hundred networks now call 60 Hudson home. John Gilbert showed a palm-sized copper cylinder cut from the very first transatlantic telephone cable, TAT-1, which connected the United States to Europe in 1955 from 32 Avenue of the Americas.

When Google purchased 111 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan for $1.9 billion in December 2010, infrastructure engineers recognized it as a primary network meeting point. London acts as a crucial hinge for global traffic, with the Docklands district—specifically the Telehouse compound opened in 1990—serving as the primary physical agglomeration for international network exchanges.

6. Undersea Cables and Maritime Engineering

Submarine fiber-optic cables bridge continents across oceans through specialized maritime engineering and strategic routing.

Undersea Cables

Undersea fiber-optic cables are the literal physical medium connecting the global Internet across oceans. These cables are thin containers for light. They require thousands of volts of electricity sent through a copper sleeve to power tuna-shaped repeaters resting on the ocean floor every fifty miles, equipped with erbium to boost photons.

Andrew Alston of TENET spent nearly $6 million a year for a limited 250-megabit connection on the SAT-3 cable before connecting to the new SEACOM cable for a much faster ten-gigabit connection at the same price. As prices fall on traditional major routes, companies like Tata Communications build global loops and target developing regions, increasing bandwidth availability in places previously dependent on satellites. Simon Cooper described Tata's global expansion, connecting new cables around Africa, the Persian Gulf, and Asia to offer round-the-world capability and restoration paths. Tata paid $130 million for the Tyco Global Network in 2004 after Tyco spent $2 billion building its global network.

Physical distance and cable routing directly dictate network latency, becoming critical for high-speed automated financial trading. Simon Cooper noted that Tata's transatlantic cable landing in New Jersey made London and New York effectively two hundred miles further apart compared to competitors landing on Long Island. Undersea earthquakes pose severe physical threats to telecommunications cables concentrated in narrow ocean channels. A 7.1 magnitude earthquake on Boxing Day 2006 struck south of Taiwan and severed seven of nine cables passing through the Bashi Channel, knocking out over six hundred gigabits of capacity and taking two months before things were back to normal.

Modern undersea cable routes trace ancient maritime port paths and historic telegraph stations. The author visited Porthcurno in Cornwall, a valley that served as the world's largest cable station and training ground for telegraph operators since 1870, handling 180 million words passing through the valley annually by 1918.

Engineering Operations

Landing and maintaining submarine cables is a specialized, highly physical maritime engineering operation. You can observe the exact sequence of a beach landing when technicians bring a major line ashore.

The author observed the complex beach landing of the West Africa Cable System in Portugal, where technicians Matt and Mark stripped armored steel layers and spliced eight hair-thin glass fibers inside a red tent.

• Drag the lightweight green nylon line ashore from the cable ship using a diver and a bulldozer on the beach.
• Pull the fiber-optic cable through the coastal conduit into the manhole and lay it in an S-pattern for storm slack.
• Cut the orange buoys free so the cable drops to the seafloor.
• Strip off the woven steel mesh armor layers from the cable using hacksaws.
• Remove successive inner layers until the plastic core, copper tube, and colored rubber threads are cleared away.
• Clean the residue off the 125-micron glass fibers using baby powder.
• Place each fiber strand into a fusing machine, align the ends visually, and bake them together.
• Slide a protective plastic sheath over the continuous strand and mount it into a rack.

7. Data Centers, Power Economics, and the Cloud

Data centers operate as massive industrial factories driven by power economics, cooling needs, and local infrastructure initiatives.

The term cloud masks the physical reality of massive industrial buildings. They demand tens of megawatts of power and millions of square feet of space. A 2010 Greenpeace report showed that data center electricity usage accounted for 2 percent of the world's total. That usage grew at 12 percent annually. A very large facility needs 500,000 square feet and demands 50 megawatts of power.

Engineers evaluate dozens of criteria on heat maps to find locations with cold, dry outside air and cheap electricity. Approximately 85 percent of the total cost is tied up in internal mechanical and electrical systems. Land, concrete, and steel account for only about 7 percent. Michael Manos used a mapping tool considering 56 criteria to build data centers for Microsoft in Quincy, Washington.

Data Centers

When local carriers delayed high-speed access for years, The Dalles formed an independent utility. They built a 17-mile fiber loop called Q-Life. This middle mile infrastructure became the key asset that convinced Google to site its massive facility there. Nolan Young led the chartering of Q-Life in 2002 for $1.8 million near the 11,249-foot-tall Mt. Hood and the 3,100-megawatt Pacific DC Intertie transmission path.

You can follow these steps to build local fiber networks:

• Charter an independent utility to build a local fiber loop.
• Connect local public institutions like schools and hospitals first.
• Establish a backhaul connection to the nearest regional transmission hub.

Technology companies enforce strict secrecy to protect competitive advantages and proprietary hardware. Andrew Blum was restricted to the perimeter and lunchroom during a visit to Google's facility in The Dalles. Facebook chose a transparent community integration strategy in Prineville, Oregon. Ken Patchett welcomed visitors to the Prineville data center, which spans 300,000 square feet across four phases and saves Facebook $2.8 million annually in taxes.

10 Key Ideas

1. The Internet is not an abstract cloud but a physical infrastructure of real buildings, cables, and machines mapped onto familiar geography.
2. The Internet expanded rapidly through packet switching, standardized protocols, and commercial exchange hubs.
3. Carrier-neutral internet exchanges and telecom hotels created secure environments for massive network interconnections.
4. Major commercial exchanges route enormous volumes of daily traffic through redundant physical pathways.
5. Modern internet connectivity relies on heavy routing machinery, historical underground conduits, and art deco buildings.
6. Submarine fiber-optic cables bridge continents across oceans through specialized maritime engineering and strategic routing.
7. Data centers operate as massive industrial factories driven by power economics, cooling needs, and local infrastructure initiatives.
8. The physical infrastructure of global telecommunications is meticulously mapped by cartographers using capacity data and actual network routes.
9. Network stability depends heavily on human relationships and cooperation forged within technical operational communities.
10. Technology companies balance strict security protocols with strategic community integration when establishing massive global data center campuses.