How does Internet work?

 

Internet is being used by most of the people all around the world. In this article, I am going to share a few things about Internet basic concepts on how it is working.

“Internet“, what does it mean?

Technically it is the large network of computers to communicate altogether.

Let’s have a deep understanding of how computers are connected.

To connect two computers and make it talk, we have to link them either via physically (Ethernet) or Wirelessly (Bluetooth or WiFi). 

Note: Basic logic behind the wired and wireless network is the same.

Let’s go step by step, to connect two computers we can link two machines in one cable. It looks easy, Right?.

Ok, When we need to connect 10 machines. It is not simple to link all the machines together. We need 45 cables to link all those 10 computers. It looks complicated, Right?

To solve this problem, each computer on a network is connected to a special tiny computer called a “router”. This router has only one responsibility: like a signaler at a railway station, it makes sure that a message sent from a given computer arrives at the right destination computer.

Now, we can connect 10 machines with 10 cables using the Router. Now it is simple. Isn’t it?

“A network of networks“, how to do that?

When there is a need to connect hundreds, thousands, millions of computers. how we can do that?

Single routers cannot scale that much. By connecting computers to routers, then routers to routers, we can scale infinitely.

This is architecture is very close to the Internet. 

How we can connect to the network around the world? Just think simple, already we have few network connections in our house like electric line, telephone line etc.

Yes, Exactly telephone line is the best way to connect ourself to all around the world. For connecting our machine to the telephone connection we need a special device called “Modem“. The modem turns the information from our network into information manageable by the telephone infrastructure and vice versa.

So, now we are connected to the telephone networks. The information from our network will be sent to the network of the destination computer. How we can transfer the information from one network to the destination network? This can be done via the Internet Service Provider(ISP).

An ISP is a company that handles some special routers that are all linked together and can also access other ISPs’ routers. So the message from our network is carried through the network of ISP networks to the destination network. The Internet consists of this whole infrastructure of networks.

This is how we are sharing our images, videos, audios, messages, documents over the network.

Ref: Mozilla Developer Site

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