Hi there! Today, let’s discuss an overview of the internet. It would be hard to imagine the world without the internet, right? The internet has revolutionised how we communicate and connect with each other, and it has transformed the way we do business and socialise.
The internet is a giant global network of interconnected devices. The number of internet-capable devices has grown exponentially in the past few years, and most modern devices are connected to the internet. Think of the internet as a postal service, but instead of papers, boxes, and envelopes, it delivers information. Everything is sent over the internet in different formats, from text messages to videos. Imagine that this is done through billions of devices connected through a network.
The networks linking these billions of devices are made up of three types of physical connections:
Copper cables and wires - information travels in the form of electrical signals.
Wireless connections (WiFi, Bluetooth, 4G, 5G)
Fiber optic cables - information travels in the form of light.
The internet was designed in the 1970s as a communication system that could survive a nuclear attack, meaning that damage to a part of the network wouldn’t deactivate the entire system, and there would remain many paths for the information to take after damage.
But how does information, such as a picture, email, or video, travel across the world in a fraction of a second?
Information sent through the internet is broken down and wrapped into information packets. These information packets travel through the internet at very high speeds with minimal errors. The whole system is highly reliable and incredibly fast. A set of rules and standards known as Internet Protocol (IP) guarantees speed and reliability. Each device gets a unique identifier known as an IP address, and the information packets get routed through different paths depending on the traffic and health of the network.
Imagine that funny cat video you send to your friend. In simple terms, the video file stored on your device gets divided into information packets. These packets are sent through the network to the destination IP address, using the best route available to avoid congestion. All of the packets reach your friend’s device and are reassembled to reconstruct the video.
In the next posts, we will dive deeper into the WWW (World Wide Web).
Cheers, Irina 😊