How The Internet Works
A study by Pew Research Center showed that 88% of adults use the internet in America in 2016. The rest are people who rely solely on their smartphones. But do you know what really happens when you search for something on Google? You might not think it, but everything is connected.
How Internet Do Things?
In a nutshell, the internet is a bunch of computers connected together to share data. Imagine if you were to take a file, save it onto a hard drive, and then walk to your neighbor's house just to show him a picture you saved of your cat. This whole process could take a while if you were trying to send this picture to your cousin a few states over. The internet is a way for you to get that picture to its destination in the fastest way possible.
How Can I Internet?
By calling your Internet Service Provider, or ISP, who then gives you a box containing the internet. But, be very careful. If you damage this box, you kill all of the internets entirely.
Hopefully, you didn't just believe me, otherwise, we might need more words in this post.
The ISP will indeed give you a box containing the internet, but all this box should do is connect to the ISP and act as the mailbox for electronics. Anything you download from a website will have to find its way to you, and now you have somewhere to deliver.
Can I internet now?
Woah there, slugger.
Actually, yes, you probably could at this point. Your ISP better be kind enough to have fully set you up if you just ask them to come by and give you the full hookup and let them do the rest.
However, you came here to learn how to set this up yourself, and how to do it right, right?
Let's get down into the serious business.
Where It All Begins
No, I don't mean all that history bull-crap that everyone learns in class before actually figuring out what the hell the instructor is talking about. I mean YOU!
That's right. You are the beginning of the internet. You are the internet! There are no higher powers than the user, no central controller, and no rules. . . Kinda.
Optimistic pep-talk aside, the rules are the same you would keep in real life, just that it's a little easier to get away with breaking them. Rules like stealing, cheating, copying, and broadcasting anything that isn't yours are really easy to break, but getting away with it would require a lot more than those hacker movies make you think.
With no central controllers, nobody tells anybody exactly what to provide for public viewing. Fundamentally, say I have a text document on my computer named "PotatosAndRice.txt" and in it would contain some text on whatever is related to the name, and anybody with my address could find it. That's what you are doing when you navigate to a website; simply navigating to a series of folders with some information. This means that there are no approving parties or content police. Just post those cat videos and enjoy. You do you, Content Creator!
How Connections Are Made
How do your cat videos get stored and accessed on a site like YouTube?
It is pretty simple to say that a connection is made from you to your router to Youtube.com, but what jumps are made?
Pick a computer or device from any of the above. Now, follow outside of the container it is in and then traces the line to the other side and pick another device.
This diagram, hypothetically, represents your home network. And you just traversed a LAN! LAN Stands for Local Area Network. This is really just a fancy way of saying a network of devices that don't span further than your buildings' walls.
If you chose to navigate to the fancy cloud at the top, you would notice the singled-out device called the modem. This is where your LAN reaches another (much larger) network, which could be a MAN or WAN.
MAN stands for Metropolitan Area Network. And WAN, while larger than a MAN, stands for Wide Area Network. These different acronyms, in order from smallest to largest, LAN, MAN, and WAN are simply labels for the more involved engineers to understand in-depth.
MANs are about the size of a city or let's say a neighborhood for this example. MANs would funnel multiple LANs into a more efficient backbone. WANs would do the same thing but funneling the MANs and connect to other WANs.
One would think that the closest Verizon store would actually be the ones to give you the internet, but this is a misconception. They do steal your money, but they don't directly provide you with the service. They would be like the leg of an octopus. All branching off the big service provider.
From Your Modem To The World
If your local stores were more like the legs of an octopus, then what does the body of the octopus do? Let's look at another diagram to make things a bit simpler.
Looks similar to before, right? Though instead of a LAN like your home, this is a MAN. Each of these routers would represent your house, and the routers outside of the box would represent your neighborhood's focal point.
These then lead to your actual ISP or the router in the center. And from there it would connect to the WAN.
Somebody Call the WANbulance!
WANs essentially are what make the Internet possible.
That's right, WANs are what connect you and your buddy in Germany.
You can probably guess where I am going with this. The smaller routers are the MANs as explained earlier, all connected to a much larger network.
Now That You Have An Idea
All of these networks are really a series of steps that an email, file transfer, or photo upload has to take in order to go from one place to the next.
To really understand just what happens when you hit "send", there are a lot more tutorials and maybe even a few certifications along the way before that can be explained. Keeping it simple, if you type a message to your boss and hit "send", that data goes through a series of hops:
- From your computer to your router
- Router to Modem
- Modem to nearest provider hop
- provider hop to ISP
- ISP to destination's ISP
- Destination's ISP to Destination's provider
- Provider to Destination's computer, or server.
This whole process would go in reverse once your message is sent and you get a reply. This same step-by-step process is very similar to the OSI model, explained in another article.
What This All Looks Like In Real Life
Now that you have a basic understanding of network setups, let's talk about how all of them connect to each other geographically.
It's crazy to think about, but there are cables that are long enough to span the ocean floors that physically connect the USA to Europe, or Asia, or Africa. Some business somewhere paid the costs of MILES upon MILES of cables to connect you to my website, or to Google, or to Microsoft. Everything is actually connected.
But, even at the speed of light, it still takes a bit of time to get from one side of the world to the other. So that is why you experience a lag in Call of Duty when connecting to a server in another country.
If you're trying to host your own Minecraft server, it may be the best idea to keep it shared with people geographically close to you, or you might need to have a server closer to your target audience.
Summary
If anything should be taken from this besides my awesome drawing skills, it should be that the internet is everyone, everywhere, sharing information.
LANs are your own devices sharing information with each other. This can be via Ethernet cables or wirelessly.
MANs are not human beings, but entire neighborhoods or cities sharing information with WANs.
WANs are networks of networks, sharing information with other geographical locations around the world.
Networks are everything, interconnected. So the next web page you visit after this one, which should be the "subscribe" page, just think about what is really happening every time something new shows up on your screen. The picture being displayed may have just crossed multiple countries without even a passport.