How Does the Internet Work? – A Simple Explanation of the Internet

Jacklyn J. Dyer February 19, 2023

Most people recognize a way to get right of entry to and use the internet, whether or not from their cell phone at paintings or Internet Cafe in Italy, but how do the net paintings precisely?

You’re on holiday in Italy, sitting at a pleasing café (with free Wi-Fi). It’s a few days into your ride now, and you’ve taken some beautiful pics which you want to share with your parents returned home.

Mom and Dad aren’t too acquainted with Dropbox or Google Drive, so rather, you connect the pictures to an email.

Your mouse hovers over the send button and clicks on it…nearly immediately. It suggests up in your Mom and Dad’s inboxes midway internationally.

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What just occurred?

First, Some Network Basics

Before we even get into how the email was given to your Mom, halfway across the world, we want to understand the physical components.

Networks are businesses of interconnected devices. Any tool this is connected to a community is called a node. Most current networks comprise the following nodes:

Network Interface Cards / Network Adapters
Switches
Router
Wireless Access Point

1. Network Interface Cards

Also known as Network Adapters, Network Interface Cards are the hardware that’s installed in computers, consisting of your computer or PC. Though no longer a node themselves, they permit computer systems and digital gadgets to sign up for a network as a node.

2. Switches

Switches are significant nodes that ahead messages between nodes within the equal community by swiftly developing and deleting connection points. You can think of them because of the managers of the community, preserving the drift of statistics among the devices in a network, whether or not wi-fi or stressed out.

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3. Router

A router is a tool that connects or greater separate networks. Routers forward information to other routers of various networks until the records have reached their destination.

4. Wireless Access Points

WAPs permit close-by computer systems and nodes to have interaction with a community wirelessly, commonly thru Wi-Fi. They’re nodes that provide wireless functionality to a stressed community.

Multiple WAPs can increase the wireless functionality variety of a network, which includes a huge construction. However, WAPs aren’t a required element of a community, as networks can continue to be absolutely hardwired.

Quick Note: Wi-Fi Connection vs. Internet Connection

Contrary to famous perception, Wi-Fi no longer has something to do with your internet connection, and the two phrases should not be used interchangeably, although they frequently are.

Wi-Fi handiest applies to the energy of your connection to a Wireless Access Point Located for your Local Area Network. Internet connection measures the power of your router’s connection to the net. You can have a sturdy connection on your Wi-Fi; however, no connection to the net or vice versa.

The Birth of the Internet

The beginning of the net started out inside the late 1960s and early 1970s from a brand new community technology created via the U.S. Department of Defense. It becomes known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET).

Its reason was to connect various Department of Defense scientists and researchers across the US working on protection initiatives. Researchers incorporated ARPANET into the networks they were running at together with universities. As increasingly more networks joined the device, the net started to take form.

So, What is the Internet?

In basic phrases, the net is a worldwide interconnected collection of networks that speak using net protocols (wait, how do protocol paintings?). You can think of it as a network of networks where each network is a node.

However, new devices and technology have created new methods to connect with networks via the net. A mixture of them is regularly used to make these connections.

1. Wired Internet

This is the maximum common form of connection to the net. Hundreds of hundreds of miles of wires are laid during the world. They range from telephone lines (DSL) to fiber optic cables.

Data can journey up to 70% the speed of mild through ideal wire mediums consisting of fiber optic cables, which allow high-speed transfer of records.

Many of those wires are laid underground or underwater to save you degrading. On land, at the side of being underground, they’re additionally placed with software traces that travel along roads.

Single traces can span thousands of miles, inclusive of the underwater transatlantic communications cables that join numerous elements of the USAand Canada to Europe. This is the right and quickest manner to get entry to the net.

2. Satellite Internet

People who’ve satellite tv for PC dishes on their roofs are connecting to the internet via satellite. This is usually required when there aren’t any stressed connections in the neighborhood area to connect with the internet, such as 1/3 world international locations and regions with low populations.

Though satellite is surprisingly speedy, it’s slightly slower than stressed out connections due to longer transmission distances (up and go into reverse instead of throughout). Also, if the very last deal with for the facts isn’t inside a range of the satellite tv for PC (like sending that email to your mother and father), the records wish to be exceeded from satellite to satellite till it arrives at one that is a variety.

3. Cellular Internet

An especially latest addition, mobile phones have joined the net. Cell telephones join using cellular towers, connecting with bodily wires and to the rest of the net.

In a sense, cell towers are the form of extremely extensive Wireless Access Points; besides, they’re only for cell phones or facts-enabled gadgets. Cell telephones might also act as wireless routers using mobile hotspots, in which a laptop or comparable tool may want to join the use of Wi-Fi to get admission to the net.

Ok, now about that e-mail…

How Does the Internet Work?

As you close your PC and preserve your adventure across Italy, your e-mail is on a journey of its own, albeit a far quicker journey.

When you clicked send, your pics Network Interface Card despatched the records in the e-mail to the Wireless Access Point using Wi-Fi. The WAP then sent the facts thru a wire to the local router.

The local router took those statistics and despatched it to another router, which then dispatched to another router, and every other router, through a series of routers until the records turned into transferred over one of the routers transatlantic communication cables to the USA.

There, it ended up at a Google statistics middle (due to the fact your parents use Gmail), and Google then dispatched a notification for your figure’s laptops declaring that they’d acquired a new electronic mail.

Mom sees it first, is going to her email account, and clicks on the e-mail. The records are transferred from the Google statistics center through more than one lines and reach the router of your mom’s home, which then is going thru the Ethernet cable she has related to her laptop, through her computer’s community interface card, and is subsequently displayed on her display screen.