Making Meaning: Tubes

Growing up I had always regarded the internet as something that just was. I never thought of it as having physical locations in the world. Tubes helped to further my understanding of the internet by describing the main locations of the internet and the main power brokers. But Tubes had its downsides. The book itself was pretty boring at times but it did do a decent job in teaching what the internet was. I really disliked the explanations of all the different companies buildings and setups because they were never enough for me. I had trouble visualizing what he described so I ended up looking up certain pieces like the MLX-32 for example. This search for pictures of the machines led

me to more information on them which was very helpful throughout reading the rest of the book.
Some of the things that I learned from this little bit of research is that these things are very expensive. The MLX-32 for example was around 164 thousand bucks. Another thing that I found amazing is the speed that it forwards data. 6.4 terabytes a second, which seems absolutely insane to me but I'm guessing that its not that much from an internet brokers perspective (http://www.brocade.com/content/dam/common/documents/content-types/datasheet/brocade-mlx-series-ds.pdf). Another thing that I found interesting was the importance of networking for networks. Blum described this process in chapter 4 of Tubes. What I found interesting was the willingness of large companies like Facebook to let networks peer with them. I guess it just makes sense from a business standpoint though. With the direct connection Facebook gets more people on their site faster and the network company makes their customers happy by providing them more speed to get them where they want to go. The term peering slut used by Blum was also pretty fun (Tubes chapter 4). Another thing that this book brought to my attention was the sort of secrecy and security that these networks had. Every time a network building was described it held a shrouded appearance. Buildings that were basically big sheds covered in cameras with unmarked doors and a lack of windows. The insides didn't seem much more appealing. Security seemed to be a constant theme in Blum's tours of the networks. Fingerprint scanners, guards, badges, and locked cages seemed to be everywhere (Tubes Chapter 4 pages 141-146). One thing that was really weird was the small amount of people that actually run the networks. When describing the network conference thing he kept saying how few people there actually was. This was very strange to me because the internet is such a big and powerful tool, I expected there to be a large amount of people working on it. Another thing that was very strange to me was the fact that almost all of the main networks I had never even heard of. Like Equinox for example. After looking up Equinox I found that they have over 145 data centers and over 180,000 cross connects. This is a lot more than I had imagined for these network companies to have.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about the workings of the internet and its many networks. The only downsides of this book are that the reading is pretty dull at times and the descriptions never seemed to be enough. Pictures would have made this book so much better to follow and visualize. I understand why this book was chosen as a textbook its has language that is very easy to follow (almost no technical terms) and helps to demystify the internet and how it works.

Works cited
Sheet, Data. Brocade MLX Series Routers (n.d.): n. pag. Web.
Blum, Andrew. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. New York: Ecco, 2012. Print.