How the Internet Works (It's a Series of Tubes)

[Bloomfield]

In case you were wondering. Explained by Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska):

There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let's talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren't using it for commercial purposes.

We aren't earning anything by going on that internet. Now I'm not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people [¿]

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says "No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet". No, I'm not finished. I want people to understand my position, I'm not going to take a lot of time. [¿]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people.

[¿]

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it's not using what consumers use every day.

It's not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a viloation of net neutraility that hits you and me.

source and context here.

[djm]

What does it mean where there's an upside-down and backwards question mark in square brackets throughout your post? e.g. [¿]. I'm not familiar with this symbol.

The senator's analogy is correct. The problem is that he doesn't seem to understand that the internet is not free, never was, and that we cannot be considered "consumers" unless there is commercial traffic in the tubes. The tubes exist expressly for commercial content, and are paid for by consumers. D'uh!

This whinge sounds a bit like the a$$holes who ruined a lot of concerts in the early 70s demanding that they should all be free. Yeah, right.

djm

[oleorezinator]

and all this time i thought it was done with mirrors.

[fearfaoin]

What does it mean where there's an upside-down and backwards question mark in square brackets throughout your post? e.g. [¿]. I'm not familiar with this symbol.

They're in the Wired blog/article, too. I'd bet they were links for a
footnote in an original transcript, that didn't transfer correctly when
the Wired blogger cut&pasted the text.

The senator's analogy is correct.

Yeah, everyone's making fun of that part, but the "Series of tubes"
analogy is probably the most sensible thing the senator said in that
diatribe. I bet he read it in a nerdly book.

You're right, he's smoking crack if he thinks the internet and
commercial interests are separate. I honestly can't tell if he's arguing
for or against net neutrality, but he does seem to be trying to put off
the argument for later.

[Wanderer]

The senator's analogy is correct.

Yeah, everyone's making fun of that part, but the "Series of tubes"
analogy is probably the most sensible thing the senator said in that
diatribe. I bet he read it in a nerdly book.

The senator's entire argument seems to come 100% from the cartoon on this site:
http://www.internetofthefuture.org/

[fiddleronvermouth]

The senator's analogy is correct.

Yeah, everyone's making fun of that part, but the "Series of tubes"
analogy is probably the most sensible thing the senator said in that
diatribe. I bet he read it in a nerdly book.

The senator's entire argument seems to come 100% from the cartoon on this site:
http://www.internetofthefuture.org/

I bet some PR firm pocketed 6 digits for that crappy cartoon.

[emmline]

I think the tube analogy comes from Bill and Ted.

[Cynth]

There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I really haven't been paying attention to the issue but this seems so odd. It sounds like it is good that you can get movies so easily but then I guess he is saying it's actually bad because they will get tangled up with your "personal internet", by which term I guess he means email. Well, couldn't you just download them as you want to watch them or something? I do almost all my major shopping on the Internet. There appear to be a huge number of people who earn a living or part of one providing goods or services via the Internet. I thought that was part of what it was for. I don't know. Maybe he is talking about Spam. I think the senator and I are equally clueless . At least I know I'm clueless though.

[Bloomfield]

... I think the senator and I are equally clueless . At least I know I'm clueless though.

Careful, now. Claiming that you know nothing, but at least know that you know nothing, is traditionally punished by tedious speeches and the hemlock cup.

[Walden]

Socrates was a wise man. He went around giving people advice. They killed him.

[Wanderer]

There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I really haven't been paying attention to the issue but this seems so odd. It sounds like it is good that you can get movies so easily but then I guess he is saying it's actually bad because they will get tangled up with your "personal internet", by which term I guess he means email. Well, couldn't you just download them as you want to watch them or something? I do almost all my major shopping on the Internet. There appear to be a huge number of people who earn a living or part of one providing goods or services via the Internet. I thought that was part of what it was for. I don't know. Maybe he is talking about Spam. I think the senator and I are equally clueless . At least I know I'm clueless though.

Basically the telcos are trying to say if they can charge for "Special and seperate pipes" they'll be able to innovate better... they'll use those special "pipes" for tv, voice over IP, etc.

But the seperate pipe thing is a sham. All of that data will still flow through the same wires...the only difference is that the telcos will be able to say "We want to charge you more for music and TV and phone calls sent through the internet" when before, those things were possible without paying an extra fee. Unless they run seperate cable, which they're not going to do, it still ends up all in the same "one big pipe"

And the thing saying Google and Yahoo are riding for free on the telcos backs is big B/S too...I guarantee they pay their ISPs a huge sum, probably millions of dollars, in internet transfer rates. They aren't getting anything for free..the only difference is, with net neutrality, they won't have to pay EXTRA, just because they're Google and Yahoo.

[Mitch]

Yeah, I worked for a telco for a few years. They hate the internet because it's open. It requires almost nil value-add - mostly, you don't have to pay each time you hop from one pipe to another. What realy realy scares the telcos is that their own research and development has made the pipes so godamn big that it's cheapenned the product to the point of being almost unbillable there are litterally millions of miles of "dark fibre" around the globe - that's fibre layed about the place that is never used because they can't get any money for it if it is. It was layed during the time that only single bands were possible to send and receive - modern laser technology allows the old fibre to carry rotationally phased signals (suddenly you can get hundreds more channels down the old one-chanel pipe) On top of that there's been even more capacity released through frequency splitting and extension of the frequencies you can shoot down the pipe. Then there's multiplexing. Those old single glass fibres turn out to be imensely more powerful than anyone ever dreamed - the old supply-and-demand economics spell the end of profits for them all - so now they want to install a whole bunch of fake "value-adds" to try to give the impression that they are actually providing value while they dismantle the only new thing humans ever created.

Personally, I believe the internet has become it's own creature - it is easily the bigest neural processor in this solar system - each connected computer or device is a cell and each of these cells has unlimited synapses - the human brain has 12 (16 for genuises) on top of this, a brain neuron can only fire - it's binary, while internet neurons have, by virtue of having a whole human attached to them, an almost infinite range of responses to stimuli. Email alone is most probably sentient beyond our wildest imaginings. I very much doubt that it will allow itself to be attacked.

Telcos can get along just fine maintaining the pipes - all the down sizing and business process re-engineering has ensured that most the stuff is automatic anyhow - there aint that many mouths left to feed. Those mouths remaining must be cavernous indeed (with bladders as big as busses and a wall 100 feet high)

[djm]

I'm afraid that's not completely correct, Mitch, at least not everywhere and not for every telco, but the general spirit of what you say is true. There are patches in the networks that need reinforcing, but the internet users don't really cover the cost in a timely way. To stay competitive and offer net services, the telcos end up funding expanding the network out of their own pockets.

Segregating the network would allow charging for the cost of the network to be directed towards those services that use it the most, so yes, stuff like VoIP, movies and tv would cost more because they use more network capacity. Big services on the net pay big bucks to their ISPs as you say, but that money is going into computer centres, not to the network itself.

There are definite advantages to having segregated networks as far as quality of service goes. Those who have had VoIP calls where you can't make out what the other person is saying half the time will understand this. Those who have not experienced it (yet) won't. VoIP has technically been around for twenty years or so. One of the problems that has always been known with it is that it cannot handle more than four hops (changes in data speed from one network to another) without quantization errors making the signal unintelligible. As well, the telcos still haven't come up with a way to direct your emergency VoIP to the appropriate 911 service desk. A segregated network at specific data speeds could help with this, but that would make the service cost more.

Something that is really hard for the telcos to deal with is that they have worked for decades to provide the best quality communications signal possible. It seems that customers are willing to put up with less. We can see this in consumers switching from wired lines to cellphones, in people giving up records, tapes and CDs for lossy mp3 format. Now we are seeing it with VoIP instead of plain old telephone service (POTS). The quality is less, but so is the price, especially for LD calls, so the market is forcing the telcos into providing bargain service versus quality service. It is a painful lesson, and it will take a while for the telcos to adapt.

djm

[Wanderer]

DJM,

A question about VOIP....if we put it on a "segregated network" (which, I assume you mean seperate wires), and charged more for...well, don't we already have a system like that already in place?

[Bloomfield]

DJM,

A question about VOIP....if we put it on a "segregated network" (which, I assume you mean seperate wires), and charged more for...well, don't we already have a system like that already in place?

LOL. Brilliant.