What is the Internet Anyway?
Thursday, August 30, 2007 - By: Laura Chan
What is the Internet?
To the uninitiated, the Internet can seem like a daunting digital delirium. Full of pitfalls and pop-up ads, many would-be users of the ‘net often leave the heavy-lifting to those under the age of 30. The internet hardly deserves to be able to inspire this much fear in the hearts of those old enough to not know about myspace.
The classical definition of the Internet itself can be mildly intimidating.
“The Internet is a world-wide conglomeration of smaller computer networks using the TCP/IP protocol to communicate.”
TCP/IP? World-wide conglomeration of smaller computers? And I thought that I just plugged this thing into my cable box or my phone and that was it?
Maybe we should then refer to a better analogy. Think of the street where you live. In order to get to your office, you probably have to drive down your road and turn on another road. You probably have to make several turns and travel down several roads before you arrive at your office or other destination. Now think of where your co-workers might live, and their commute to the office. Obviously, your co-workers live in different places, but all of you manage to arrive at the same destination every morning. Think now about your summer vacation road trip to Orlando with your kids. You take roads to larger Interstate Highways to cities far away from your home. So smaller roads, lead to larger roads, which lead to Interstate Highways.
Information from your computer navigates the Internet much like you navigate from your neighborhood to your desired destination across town or across the country. In the case of your computer, information is sent out in packets. A packet is like your car, maybe more like an SUV or minivan. You can fit 8 people in a van or SUV, and that’s precisely how many bits fit into a packet. But I digress. The point is that a carload of data drives across the internet to get to another computer somewhere across the country or world. So, think of the Internet like a network of roads and bridges (and maybe even planes to get to other continents), data like the passengers in the cars and planes, and your computer like houses, and other computers elsewhere in the world like your destinations.
To illustrate this point further, take one of the standard tasks that people do on the internet everyday: shopping. Perhaps you are trying to buy a book from amazon.com, a well-known purveyor of books and everything else you can possibly think of on the Internet. You open your web browser, or program that communicates with the internet. When you enter the URL or web address for the site and hit the “Go” button, your web browser sends a request to your Internet Service Provider. To reach your Internet Service Provider, your request must be sent through your modem of either phone, cable or DSL, and then to the transfer station on your street. The data then gets sent through the phone or cable lines to a server at your ISP’s office. From here, the data travels out again through cable to its destination server. The data may make many turns, if you will, at different network nodes (think intersections) to travel across the country, or even world, and then back to your computer at your home or office. But amazon.com loads in a couple of seconds, how is that possible?
Cache (pronounced cash) provides a way for commonly viewed pages to be stored for later viewing. Pages are cached both by your local machine, and by servers. Many Internet Service Providers cache popular sites on the internet daily so that their subscribers do not have to make a request to the origin server too frequently and bog down bandwidth.
The amount of data that an Internet connection can handle per unit of time is called bandwidth. You may have heard this term in relation to a cable or other connection to the internet. This concept descends from radio communication where the bandwidth was a measure of the broadcast frequency, or amount of energy produced by the station’s particular signal. Much in the same way, the concept of bandwidth as it relates to your internet connection measures the amount of data per unit time.
So through cache and large amounts of bandwidth, your data packets do not always need to travel around the world to bring you your information. This is why it does not take seconds, but only fractions of seconds to bring you the data you request.