Despite the fact that we use it every day, most of us don't really know where the Internet comes from or how it works. Hint: it's not magic, and it's not exactly a 'series of tubes'.

In a paper that was presented at the Sigcomm conference this summer, researchers have put together a fuller picture of the physical internet--the cell towers, routers, switches, and fiber-optic cables that make the World Wide Web work. They ended up creating the first detailed, public map of Internet infrastructure.

Sure, you could just go to Comcast's website to see where its network coverage is, but the maps that have been available so far have been either far less detailed or decentralized.

The researchers combined data from companies like Comcast and Verizon with data from the Internet Atlas project, and then added in information found in public records to build a U.S. map of the long-haul fiber-optic wired Internet--which is the static underlying infrastructure that connects cities across the country. The amount of data combing and combining they did is impressive, to say the least.