Series of tubes
Encyclopedia
Ted Stevens
Theodore Fulton "Ted" Stevens, Sr. was a United States Senator from Alaska, serving from December 24, 1968, until January 3, 2009, and thus the longest-serving Republican senator in history...
(R
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
-Alaska
Alaska
Alaska is the largest state in the United States by area. It is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait...
) to describe the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
in the context of opposing network neutrality
Network neutrality
Network neutrality is a principle that advocates no restrictions by Internet service providers or governments on consumers' access to networks that participate in the Internet...
. On June 28, 2006, he used this metaphor to criticize a proposed amendment to a committee bill. The amendment would have prohibited Internet service provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
s such as AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
and Verizon Communications
Verizon Communications
Verizon Communications Inc. is a global broadband and telecommunications company and a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average...
from charging fees to give some companies higher priority access to their networks or their customers. This metaphor has been widely ridiculed as demonstrating Stevens's poor understanding of the Internet, despite the fact that he was in charge of regulating it. Edward Felten
Edward Felten
Edward William Felten is a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University. On November 4, 2010 he was named the Chief Technologist for the United States Federal Trade Commission, a position he officially assumed January 3, 2011.Felten has done a variety of computer...
, Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
professor of computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
, pointed out the unfairness of some criticisms of Stevens's wording, while maintaining that the underlying arguments were rather weak.
Partial text of Stevens's comments
Media mention
On June 28, 2006, Public KnowledgePublic Knowledge
Public Knowledge is a non-profit Washington, D.C.-based public interest group that is involved in intellectual property law, competition, and choice in the digital marketplace, and an open standards/end-to-end internet....
government affairs manager Alex Curtis wrote a brief blog entry introducing the senator's speech and posted an MP3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
recording. The next day, the Wired
Wired (magazine)
Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...
magazine blog 27B Stroke 6 featured a much longer post by Ryan Singel
Ryan Singel
Ryan Singel is a San Francisco-based blogger and journalist covering tech business, tech policy, civil liberty and privacy issues. His work has appeared extensively in Wired.com, and Singel co-founded the Threat Level blog with journalist and convicted hacker Kevin Lee Poulsen...
, which included Singel's transcriptions of some parts of Stevens's speech considered the most humorous. Within days, thousands of other blogs and message boards, including BoingBoing, Slashdot
Slashdot
Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
, Fark
Fark
Fark is a community website created by Drew Curtis that allows members to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. As of June 2009, the site boasts approximately four million unique visitors per month, which puts it among the top 100 English language websites...
, DailyKos, and others posted the story.
Most writers and commentators derisively cited several of Stevens's misunderstandings of Internet technology, arguing that the speech showed that he had formed a strong opinion on a topic which he understood poorly (e.g., referring to an e-mail message as "an Internet" and blaming bandwidth issues for an e-mail problem much more likely to be caused by mail server or routing
Routing
Routing is the process of selecting paths in a network along which to send network traffic. Routing is performed for many kinds of networks, including the telephone network , electronic data networks , and transportation networks...
issues). The story sparked mainstream media attention, including a mention in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
. The technology podcast This Week in Tech
This Week in Tech
This Week in Tech–casually referred to as TWiT, and formerly known as Revenge of the Screen Savers–is the weekly flagship podcast of the TWiT.tv network...
discussed the incident.
According to The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
, as summarized by MediaPost commentator Ross Fadner:
Technical analysis
The term pipe is a commonly used idiomIdiom
Idiom is an expression, word, or phrase that has a figurative meaning that is comprehended in regard to a common use of that expression that is separate from the literal meaning or definition of the words of which it is made...
to refer to a data connection, with pipe diameter being analogous to bandwidth or throughput
Throughput
In communication networks, such as Ethernet or packet radio, throughput or network throughput is the average rate of successful message delivery over a communication channel. This data may be delivered over a physical or logical link, or pass through a certain network node...
. For instance, high-bandwidth connections are often referred to as "fat pipes."
Most routers use a data structure called a queue to buffer packets. Under normal operations, all packets move to the front of the queue and are forwarded in a timely manner. When packets arrive more quickly than can be forwarded, the queue length builds up, and the router may start dropping incoming packets either randomly (RED
Random early detection
Random early detection , also known as random early discard or random early drop is an active queue management algorithm. It is also a congestion avoidance algorithm....
) or according to some rule (AQM
Active Queue Management
In Internet routers, active queue management is a technique that consists in dropping or ECN-marking packets before a router's queue is full.-Queue management:...
) in an effort to prevent or at least delay overrunning the queue. If the queue is completely full, all arriving packets will be dropped. On links that become congested, packets typically spend more time in the queue than they do actually moving down wires or optical fiber. If this dropping or delaying of data occurs to packets that make up certain real-time Internet applications (such as voice over IP
Voice over IP
Voice over Internet Protocol is a family of technologies, methodologies, communication protocols, and transmission techniques for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol networks, such as the Internet...
), the application may prove impossible to use. Email, presumably what Stevens was referring to when he discussed his staff sending him "an internet" that was delayed several days, is not affected by this kind of sub-second latency. Futhermore, this effect only exists for information being retrieved by the user; activity outside the user's personal network generally has no effect.
Pop culture references
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has made multiple references to Stevens's "series of tubes" description; as a result, Stevens has become well known as the person who once headed the committee charged with regulating the Internet. "I have a letter from a big scientist who said I was absolutely right in using the word 'tubes'," Stevens said to reporters in response to The Daily Shows coverage. When asked if he'd think about going on the show to debate Jon StewartJon Stewart
Jon Stewart is an American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian...
, Stevens replied, "I'd consider it."
In the keynote speech at the 2007 Penny Arcade Expo
Penny Arcade Expo
The Penny Arcade Expo is a semi-annual gamer festival held in Seattle and Boston. PAX was created by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the authors of the Penny Arcade webcomic, because they wanted to attend a show that gave equal attention to console gamers, computer gamers, and tabletop...
, Wil Wheaton
Wil Wheaton
Richard William "Wil" Wheaton III is an American actor and writer. As an actor, he is best known for his portrayals of Wesley Crusher on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, Gordie Lachance in the film Stand by Me and Joey Trotta in Toy Soldiers...
spoke about remembering when the Internet was more like a truck than a series of tubes.
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
has included references to this in two of its products. Gears
Gears (software)
Gears, formerly Google Gears, is software offered by Google that "enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser. It allows some online files to be used offline"...
' about box
About box
An about box or about dialog is a dialog box that displays the credits and revision information of a computer software.Generally, most programs' about boxes include information about product name and installed version, company name, and copyright information...
says "the gears that power the tubes" and Google Chrome
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or...
had an about: easter egg
Easter egg (media)
Image:Carl Oswald Rostosky - Zwei Kaninchen und ein Igel 1861.jpg|250px|thumb|right|Example of Easter egg hidden within imagerect 467 383 539 434 desc none...
at the address
about:internetsInternetsThe Internet is a worldwide publicly accessible system of interconnected computer networks.Where not capitalized, internet may refer to:* Any internetwork* A private network, referred to in RFC 1918 as "private internets"...
which displayed a screensaver of tubes (if Windows XPWindows XP
Windows XP is an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops and media centers. First released to computer manufacturers on August 24, 2001, it is the second most popular version of Windows, based on installed user base...
's sspipes.scr is installed) with the page title "Don't Clog the Tubes!" When "about:internets" was entered on a computer lacking that screensaver, the tab displayed a gray screen with the page title "The Tubes are Clogged!" This easter egg was removed as of the 2.0.169.1 release.
Tribute
Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post wrote a humorous article entitled "Sen. Stevens, the tubes salute you" after Stevens died in an airplane crash August 9, 2010.:And as people remember him, make ill-timed jests, and muse on his legacy—all in real time, in great profusion—I worry that they are disrupting the ability of people elsewhere to receive their Internets. But for us in the Facebook generation who weren't around for the first plane crash and know the Bridge to NowhereGravina Island BridgeThe Gravina Island Bridge, commonly referred to as the "Bridge to Nowhere", was a proposed bridge to replace the ferry that currently connects the town of Ketchikan, Alaska, with Gravina Island, an island which contains the Ketchikan International Airport as well as 50 residents. The bridge was...
primarily as an SNL punchline, the senator's legacy is in that series of tubes.
See also
- Cascading failureCascading failureA cascading failure is a failure in a system of interconnected parts in which the failure of a part can trigger the failure of successive parts.- Cascading failure in power transmission :...
- Congestive collapse
- Fairness measureFairness measureFairness measures or metrics are used in network engineering to determine whether users or applications are receiving a fair share of system resources. There are several mathematical and conceptual definitions of fairness.-TCP fairness:...
- Information superhighwayInformation superhighwayThe information superhighway or infobahnwas a popular term used through the 1990s to refer to digital communication systems and the Internet telecommunications network. It is associated with United States Senator and later Vice-President Al Gore....
- Internet memeInternet memeThe term Internet meme is used to describe a concept that spreads via the Internet. The term is a reference to the concept of memes, although the latter concept refers to a much broader category of cultural information.-Description:...
- InternetsInternetsThe Internet is a worldwide publicly accessible system of interconnected computer networks.Where not capitalized, internet may refer to:* Any internetwork* A private network, referred to in RFC 1918 as "private internets"...
- Neologism
- Network congestion avoidance
- Optical fiberOptical fiberAn optical fiber is a flexible, transparent fiber made of a pure glass not much wider than a human hair. It functions as a waveguide, or "light pipe", to transmit light between the two ends of the fiber. The field of applied science and engineering concerned with the design and application of...
- Peter OpenshawPeter OpenshawSir Charles Peter Lawford Openshaw , styled The Hon. Mr Justice Openshaw, is an English judge of the High Court, Queen's Bench Division, in London...
- Putt's law
External links
- "Mr. Stevens's wild ride through a 'series of tubes' ", an early history of the memeMemeA meme is "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena...
by former Public KnowledgePublic KnowledgePublic Knowledge is a non-profit Washington, D.C.-based public interest group that is involved in intellectual property law, competition, and choice in the digital marketplace, and an open standards/end-to-end internet....
intern Tim Schneider - New York Times: "Senator’s Slip of the Tongue Keeps on Truckin’ Over the Web"
- This WEEK in TECH podcast talking about net neutrality and the series of tubes