The Physical World Of The Internet - Part 2

August 22, 2012

Interview with Andrew Blum, author of the book Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

________________

Mike Carruthers:
When you send an email overseas or make an international phone call how does that information travel? Most people think those communications are by satellite.

Andrew Blum:
Which they very rarely are only in very special cases the vast majority of communications are through these undersea cables.
 

Andrew Blum, author of the book Tubes  has explored the very physical world of the internet and says for communication satellite is a technology of last resort.

For a bunch of reasons partly the fibrotic technology is so sophisticated that it just keeps swallowing everything we can throw at it. You put new equipment on either end of the cable and the same cable transmits 10 times or even 100 times more information.

The second reason is that satellites in space are long way away.

Long enough that there’s a delay in the telephone conversation or long enough that delay (which the techies call latency) is significant. It turns out the best way to avoid it is to string a cable on the ocean floor for 6 thousand miles.

Have you even wondered how it is that all our different computers and operating systems and mobile devices that somehow they’re all compatible on the internet.

The internet is about providing a common language for networks to talk to each other and that common language is PCPIP and that’s really what made it. In a very distinctive historical moment New Year ’s Eve 1984 was the moment when PCPIP became the dominant lingua franca for the networks to be able to internetwork.