Andrew Blum, Ecco, 304 pages, $26.99
Andrew Blum's interest in the infrastructure behind the Internet began the day a squirrel chewed through the wire connecting his house to the online world. His book is an engaging reminder that the Internet is as much a thing of flesh and steel as any industrial-age factory. It is also an excellent introduction to how it all works.
The term "Internet" is a collective noun for thousands of smaller networks, run by corporations, governments and universities, all stitched together to form one "internetworked" whole. In theory, the Internet is meant to be widely distributed and heavily resilient, with many possible routes between any two destinations. In practice, a combination of economics and geography means that much of its infrastructure is concentrated in a comparatively small number of places.
So when Blum, a writer for Wired, travels to the tiny Cornish village of Porthcurno, he is able to see the landing stations for many of the transatlantic fiber-optic cables that carry traffic between Europe and the Americas. A couple of hundred miles up the road is the London Internet Exchange, a building in which individual networks can connect to each other and to the wider Internet. What happens in such places can affect millions of people: one veteran network engineer in an American exchange recalls "shut[ting] off Australia" when one of that country's big networks was tardy with its bills.
Network engineering is not a glamorous profession, and the physical structures of the greatest network ever built lack the grandeur of a hydroelectric dam or a continent-spanning railway. But they do have their own style: featureless, virtually deserted buildings, full of marching rows of high-tech servers and routers fed by thick bundles of cable.
Blum's book is a timely antidote to oft-repeated abstractions about "cyberspace" or "cloud computing." Such terms gloss over the fact that, just like the pipes that carry water, the tubes that carry bits are reliant on old-fashioned, low-tech spadework, human contact and the geographical reality in which all that exists.
THE ECONOMIST
