Actually, the Internet IS a series of tubes...
Alaska's Senior Senator Ted Stevens was widely disparaged for a speech he gave back in June of 2006 when he compared the Internet as a "series of tubes"[1]. The backlash against the comment was quite remarkable, IMHO. People seemed to believe that this was an example of how stupid senators could be when dealing with technology (John Stewart did an awesome bit on it where he got John Hodgeman to admit "I'm a PC" on TDS (I can't find a link to the video unfortunately)).
The other day, I was chatting with a developer from the networking group, and I commented to him that I thought that Stevens was right. The Internet really IS a series of tubes. The other developer looked at me strangely until I explained my reasoning to him.
If I was to describe the whole "Net Neutrality" debate (a subject on which I am completely agnostic) to a layman, I think I'd end up describing it by using something like the "series of tubes" analogy (I'd probably talk about pipes and hoses though).
It turns out that when discussing bandwidth, pipes that carry water almost perfectly model the Internet. Bigger pipes can carry more water, smaller pipes can carry less water. There's no way of forcing more water through a pipe than the pipe can physically hold, and you simply aren't going to get 1Mb/s download rates through a 56kb/s modem. Similarly, pipes don't have to be filled to capacity - you don't have to use the bandwidth.
You could model the Internet as a series of interconnected pipes of varying diameters and length which carry data from the servers to the client computer, and not be too far wrong. Water (data) flows more quickly through the larger pipes and slower through the smaller pipes. Since the pipes are interconnected, data can travel via multiple paths between the server and the client, choosing the optimal path. If large sections of the pipes are blocked (water main breaks), the data is redirected via another path, potentially at a loss of bandwidth.
If you think about the Internet as a series of pipes, the "Net Neutrality" debate then boils down to a discussion about allowing paying customers to reserve space within the pipes (which reduces the capacity that the non paying customers have available) or equivalently allowing paying customers to use alternate pipes that are only available to those customers (thus allowing the companies to reduce the size of the pipe that's available for the non paying customers, since they don't use as much bandwidth as the paying customers). The people who are in favor of "Net Neutrality" want to force the pipe companies to keep the high volume traffic on the same pipes as their traffic (thus enabling more bandwidth for everyone), the people who oppose "Net Neutrality" (mostly the people who own the pipes) want to build an mechanism that allows them to gain additional revenue from the people who put the most data into their pipes.
If I had to guess, Stevens asked one of his staffers to explain the "Net Neutrality" issue to him, and the staffer came up with the "series of tubes" as a way of explaining it to Stevens, then Stevens ran with the idea, much to his later embarrassment.
[1] I am now officially flabbergasted. The wikipedia has an article explicitly about "a series of tubes". For the record, I wrote this post before I read it (since some of my comments above are reflected in the article).
Comments
Anonymous
July 30, 2007
I still think roads, Highways and freeways are the best description.Anonymous
July 30, 2007
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July 30, 2007
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July 30, 2007
Actually, bigger pipes can carry more water but not any faster than smaller pipes. It is pipes carrying water under higher pressure that carry water more quickly, so the physics of your analogy is a bit off. Sorry, the "series of tubes" analogy for packet-switched networks just isn't a very good one.Anonymous
July 30, 2007
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July 30, 2007
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July 30, 2007
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July 30, 2007
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July 30, 2007
Yes, Larry, but who pays in the end? It's still the consumers.Anonymous
July 30, 2007
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July 30, 2007
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July 30, 2007
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July 30, 2007
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July 30, 2007
Larry, ajb has the right idea. While the telco's are using the thought of charging big names extra as the selling point, they're really after something different. Once they've established that it's OK to discriminate against certain packets, what they really want is to prohibit (or charge more for) packets that undermine their other businesses. Who'll pay 90 cents per minute for a call to Austrailia when VoIP works seamlessly? Who'll pay for premium cable if you could get similar service cheaper via IP download? If it were really about giving reserved bandwidth to the big names, you'd see them clamoring for non-neutrality. As it is, they're uniformly for preserving neutrality. For a look at how non-neutrality plays out, just check the conditions on data service with most cell phones. Unless you pay an arm and a leg, they restrict you to just http (text and images) and email. They do their best to restrict everything else, especially streaming audio. (Why give it to you for free when you might otherwise pay 31 cents/minute?) (And if I try to run Skype on my cell phone, the connection gets made but the audio mysteriously disappears after 5 secxonds.) In short, non-neutrality is not about serving you better; it's about extracting more money from a (mostly) captive audience.Anonymous
July 30, 2007
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July 30, 2007
I think it's a perfectly good analogy. People rejecting it seem to expect analogies to be exact replicas of a situation in another domain but they don't have to be that to be useful. Analogies are just rough tools for allowing people to think about something and grasp the very fundamentals of something unfamiliar. If you dig deep enough then all analogies fall apart because, shockingly, they're not descriptions of the exact same thing they're being used to illustrate. Nobody hears an analogy and thinks that gives them a full, deep understanding of something. It's just a starting point.Anonymous
July 30, 2007
The analogy itself is reasonably sound and works well as a non-technical explanation. The problem was that Stevens was stretching it too hard, which just served to demonstrate how little he knew about what he was saying. For that he deserved most of the ridicule he got.Anonymous
July 31, 2007
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July 31, 2007
This would (of course?) be the Senator Stevens whose house was just searched by the FBI.Anonymous
July 31, 2007
Frank, and that has nothing to do with whether or not his analogy was accurate. I try VERY hard to stay away from politics on this blog.Anonymous
July 31, 2007
The "series of tubes" thing is news only for noobs. The old generation knows that it was always about pipes and liquids: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bit-bucket.htmlAnonymous
July 31, 2007
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July 31, 2007
> I try VERY hard to stay away from politics on this blog. Oh? The base note started: > Alaska's Senior Senator Ted Stevens instead of "Some random person Ted Stevens". I agree with you that Frank Wilhoit's comment had nothing to do with whether the analogy was accurate, but the comment was a lot less political than the base note. The FBI's antics are more outrageous than politicians, but that doesn't make them political.Anonymous
July 31, 2007
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July 31, 2007
Norman, acknowledging someone's job isn't political. Calling Bill Clinton the "Adulterer In Chief" is political (which is not intended to be a statement about Clinton, it's just an example of a politically tinged reference). Whether you like it or not, Ted Stevens IS the senior senator from the state of Alaska.Anonymous
September 24, 2007
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