It’s not a Big Truck

Senator Ted Stevens is clearly a very corrupt politician, and Alaska will do well to be rid of him (in fact, recent polling shows that his prospects for this November’s election weren’t so good even before yesterday’s indictment).

But Ted Stevens has also given the world a great gift, in the form of a few words of wisdom he spoke on a fateful day in June of 2006.

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.

[...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Every time I experience slow upload speeds on my cable internet at home, or a website takes a few minutes to load, or I see a big truck, I think of Ted. When my demo app at TechEd 2007 in Orlando took a few moments to download data from my server back in Redmond, I was able to fill the time with a simple reminder to my audience that the internet is a series of tubes.

Recently, one of Kenny’s co-workers asked him a question about one-way messaging and WCF. He forwarded me his response, which borrowed a few of Ted’s words of wisdom to illustrate how TCP and pipes work:

UDP is fundamentally one-way. MSMQ also fundamentally supports one-way.

HTTP and TCP (and pipes) have built-in throttling to the protocol. While you can send one-way messages down the pipe on TCP and Pipes, they will eventually back up (remember, the internet is not a big truck; it is a series of tubes and sometimes they get clogged)…

Thanks, Ted.