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

Jacklyn J. Dyer February 15, 2024

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

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

Mom and Dad aren’t familiar with Dropbox or Google Drive, so 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

We want to understand the physical components before we understand how the email was given to your Mom halfway across the world.

Networks are businesses of interconnected devices. Any tool that 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 installed in computers, consisting of your computer or PC. Though no longer a node, 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 community managers, 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 network routers until the records reach their destination.

4. Wireless Access Points

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

Multiple WAPs can increase a network’s wireless functionality variety, including 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 in 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 relation to the net or vice versa.

The Birth of the Internet

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

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

So, What is the Internet?

In basic phrases, the net is a worldwide interconnected collection of networks that use 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 most common form of connection to the net. Hundreds of hundreds of miles of wires are laid around the world. They range from telephone lines (DSL) to fiber optic cables.

Data can journey up to 70% of mild speed through ideal wire mediums consisting of fiber optic cables, allowing high-speed record transfer.

Many wires are laid underground or underwater to save you from 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, including the underwater transatlantic communications cables that join numerous elements of the USAand and Canada to Europe. This is the right and quickest manner to get entry to the net.

2. Satellite Internet

People with satellite T.V. for P.C. 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 communicate with the internet, such as 1/3 of 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, suppose the last deal with the facts isn’t inside a range of the satellite TV for P.C. (like sending that email to your mother and father). In that case, the records wish to be exceeded from satellite to satellite until they arrive at 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 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 email…

How Does the Internet Work?

As you close your P.C. and preserve your adventure across Italy, your email is on its own, albeit a far quicker journey.

When you click send, your pics Network Interface Card despatched the records in the email to the Wireless Access Point using wi-fi. The WAP then sent the facts through a wire to the local router.

The local router took those statistics and despatched them 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 router’s transatlantic communication cables to the USA.

There, it ended up at a Google statistics middle (because your parents use Gmail). Google then dispatched a notification for your figure’s laptops declaring they ’ hired a new electronic mail.

Mom sees it first, goes to her email account, and clicks on the email. The records are transferred from the Google statistics center through more than one line and reach the router of your Mom’sMom, which then goes through the Ethernet cable she has related to her laptop, through her compucomputer’sunity interface card, and subsequently displayed on her display screen.