AP/Yahoo: North Korea launches cyber attacks against United States, S. Korea

[JMS]

If some of you only knew what went on over the int3rtubez.

That 84 year old senator Stevens from Alaska said the internet was a series of tubes and everybody jumped down his neck for being out of touch. The internet isn't tubes. Information is broken down into packages and those packets are efficiently and indepenently transported to their destination address and re-assembled. TUBES? That's exactly what the intenert is designed to avoid. Wasted bandwidth reserved for folks who aren't even online.

Problem is Stevens was actually correct. The internet is a series of tubes. Not from the end user perspective, but from the infrastructure perspective of the network. WAN's like the internet operate over a back bone and don't operate like your local eithernet connection where all the bandwidth is shared. On the backbone the network is broken down into OC 768, OC 192, OC 48, OC 16, OC 12, OC 3, DS3, DS 1, DS 0, T-3 or T-1 lines.....

Each line's capacity feeds up from points of prescense into a consolidated backbone superhighway which pretty much has to account for the capacity of each of it's sub branches.....

Your local cable modem might share capaciity with 20 neighborhood homes, but that "shared" capacity must be accounted for with dedicated bandwidth by the infrastructure to ensure the capacity is available when the set of home owners require it. Thus to the end user Stevens seemed out of touch, but what he was quoting was a brief he recieved from internet infrastructure folks and was accurate. Stevens got that level of detail cause congress supports improvements to the countries infrastructure at the backbone level, not the home end user level.