As it announced that the Altoona data center is now serving traffic to some of its 1.35 billion users, the company also revealed how its engineers pieced together the computer network that moves all that digital information through the facility. The rather complicated arrangement shows, in stark fashion, that the largest internet companies are now constructing their computer networks in very different ways---ways that don't require expensive networking gear from the likes of Cisco and Juniper, the hardware giants that played such a large role when the foundations of the net were laid.