The Internet

The book I read to research this post was Tubes: Behind The Scenes At The Internet by Andrew Blum which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is several years old but was quite successful and was number 1 on the kindle computing e-book chart. It was inspired when Andrew had to call out a computer engineer to fix his internet connection outage which was because a squirrel had chewed through a wire. It got him thinking how fragile the internet is that it can be put out of action so easily and got him thinking what is the internet? This book looks at the infrastructure and history of the internet. Even before the internet big organisations like NASA had their own telecommunication networks. The ARPANET which would eventually become the internet and was initially a computer network run by the Department Of Defence in the USA came about because they wanted a network that was resilient to nuclear attack. The result was a network run along telephone cable and using the TCP/IP protocol which is still used in a similar form today. If you visited an ISP's internet base you might be surprised that the router they use for all their customers is a cisco router not much bigger than the router in your home although it has many more wires and is much more expensive. Apparently a typical capacity is 800 billion bits a second and don't forget this is constantly increasing. You would see a huge wiring network at this internet base with many components interconnected. The big data-centers that are just starting to become a reality which cover a huge area of subscribers often aren't that big. In this book Google is quoted as having a billion searches a day and Facebook has 6 billion photos uploaded every month. The kind of storage used on networks such as these is set to rise exponentially. 2 billion people use the internet in one form or another every day according to this book and don't forget that's  probably more by now. There was an amusing incident when a pensioner accidently dug through a fibre optic cable in his garden in the republic of Georgia and the entire country of Armenia was offline for 12 hours as a result. I enjoyed enjoyed reading this book which is a little bit anecdotal and keeps your interest throughout. The title stems from a comment by a USA senator that the internet consisted of tubes which was ridiculed but if he is referring to the fiber optic cable which is hollow and is used on many high capacity networks he might have a point.