I remember people used to rag on that guy (a US senator, perhaps?) for coming up with an analogy of the internet (back then it was spelled capital-I Internet) as a series of tubes. It's better than the "it's a series of dump trucks" straw man he compared it to, though.
I wonder, though ... a series of dump trucks all loaded with homing pigeons? That could work!

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149

#AvianDinosaur

RFC 1149: Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avian carriers