Hey hey,
My apologies this is a Tuesday, I genuinely got my days mixed up,
I am very fortunate to be writing this from the Austrian Alps, doing my favourite thing in the world, skiing.
I thought I would just explain something that seems to either really confuse people or is simply completely misunderstood - the internet…
C’mere to me…
The Internet EXPLAINED
Just the basics.
This is a funny topic, some of you will react with “yeah duh?”(in which case skip to the end) and others might actually find this really interesting.
If you don’t know how the internet works, fear not, I am here to clear things up, please do give this a read…
First and foremost, it is important to grasp that the internet is a PHYSICAL thing.
The term ‘cloud’ is a marketing term to make sense of it all, but there is nothing stored in the clouds, my friends.
All data is stored on servers, which are basically just computers that are constantly running, and are made up of several hard drives.
Internet Ocean Cable Lines
Data is stored on servers in clever ways, such as RAID arrays, so that if drives fail the system doesn’t lose any data.
Storing this data isn’t easy, big tech giants all run their own servers at massive data centres - Facebook, Google etc
Instagram, which was recently moved from Amazon AWS servers to Facebook’s own servers, must constantly store over 20 Billion digital photos, ready for you to retrieve at a moments notice, and they must add new serves every single day.
However, everyone’s website is hosted (stored) on a server somewhere, and logistically it doesn’t make sense for you to run your computer 24/7 just to host your own little website, so you pay someone else to store the data - Squarespace, etc
Cellular devices connect to their towers and satellites wirelessly, however those towers have a physical connection to the internet. The world has a colossal network of internet cables that cross oceans and continents.
Fibre optic cables use light waves instead of electric current to transfer data, so that is how information can travel so much faster around the world and is why ‘fibre’ broadband was all the hype for homes a few years ago.
Fun fact, the internet cables had to be reinforced to be made shark-proof.
This is a real picture of a shark attempting to bite one of Google’s undersea cables
Here are some trivial things you need to understand:
- The World Wide Web and the internet are NOT the same thing.
- Wifi does NOT mean the internet
- Mb/s does NOT stand for megabytes per second
There is so much we could talk about, but let’s just talk about the BASICS and in terms of your own device receiving information from ‘the internet’.
The first part of the internet is a tonne of hardware - that is servers, router, cables, cell towers, satellites etc
The second part is the Protocols - which are essentially the rules.
We need rules to ensure everything works together seamlessly around the world and that all computers can read and understand the information sent from other computers.
The protocols provide both the method and a common language for machines to use to transmit data.
One such protocol is http - hypertext transfer protocol, which I won’t get into but you’ll know as being a structure for the start of web addresses.
The World Wide Web amongst other things, it is a set of common rules for how we structure addresses. It is extremely widely adapted, all websites you access start with www, etc
However, so much runs on the internet that does not make use of the world wide web, so it is very important not to casually interchange the terms, the internet is much bigger and the WWW simply runs on the internet.
There is a router in your home which creates a wifi network, however, the wifi network is a wireless medium for connecting to the internet.
Your router is connected to the internet by cable, if disconnected the wifi network will still work but there will be no internet access, it is simply a transfer medium and can easily be used to send files to other devices on the network without the internet.
The much more important type of ‘router’ is the large telecoms companies that provide the infrastructure to route internet requests around the world - Virgin Media, Sky, Verizon, AT&T etc
When you search for something in your web browser, your computer sends a request over the network to your Internet Service Provider (ISP), this request then gets sent by the ISP further up the internet chain to another server and eventually the domain name server (DNS), where a match is checked for the website domain name that you requested. Once it finds the domain web server, the requested files are sent back in packets.
Information travels across the internet in packets. Packets are broken up parts of a file between 1,000 and 1,500 bytes.
The mad bit is that the packets don’t necessarily take the same path to get to your device, they take the path of least resistance, so if one leaves later and finds a quicker path, they can arrive in completely the wrong order, therefore packets have headers and footers that tell computers what's in it and how the information fits with other packets to create an entire file.
This is just a last little nugget of information, but broadband companies like to offer internet speeds in Mb/s, which people constantly and wrongly refer to as megabytes.
Infact it stands for megabits, I don’t have time to try explain computer bits, but just know that there are 8 bits for every 1 byte… that’s how they get you.
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Guy