Tubes a journey to the center of the Internet

The internet is a series of tubes. Quite literally. Everything you do online requires data to travel through thousands of miles of tubes. This is a tale about finding these tubes, the physical locations our digital data travel through.

The author lavishly regales his journey to the internet backbone buildings across the world, the obscure conferences, and various historically relevant locations involved in the creation and maintenance of the modern Internet.

This is a pop-science book, which I am now realizing has similar issues to the pop-psychology books I've previously read.
The author formats the book in a first-person narrative, from the perspective of a layman, adding in all sorts of irrelevant information to keep the reader engaged and the “narrative flowing”. But I don't really care about what the author thinks or feels, I just want to learn. I want a “How It's Made”, technically-focused, detailed book. But that's not what this is, which is disappointing.

Ive been googling up a storm trying to understand PON/AON, QAM, Multiplexing, FTTx, and other aspects about how the internet works that were COMPLETELY ABSENT in this book.

But it's written by a layman for laymen, so if you want to learn about data centers and intercontinental fiberoptic cables, network centers, and...some other random irrelevant crap formulated as a whimsical journey, this book is for you. But I was disappointed.

Funnily enough, I just noticed the cover has a quote from the author of “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)” by Tom Vanderbilt, which is another pop science/pop psychology book written by a layman about a complicated subject: automobile traffic. That's funny because that book was WAY better than this one. Go read Traffic.