How Internet works?

Internet is an unimaginably larger system that has millions of networks interconnected with each other. A network can be as small as just two computers connected using an Ethernet cable or as huge as thousands of computers and hundreds of web servers connected together. The data requested by a user is provided by any of these networks in the Internet.

There are many actions which takes place in a fraction of second when we open the home page of a website in a web-browser. For example, when we type the URL of Google and hit enter, the request searches the Internet and retrieves the home page of Google in the web-browser.

Let’s study the step by step actions that take place while we try to open the home page of Google. (Although many have already tried this, we just thought of making it even simpler.)

1. As we know, computers read data in the form of 1’s and 0’s. So after we hit enter, the URL: www.google.com is converted into 1’s and 0’s. This information is transferred in the form of Internet packets with the senders address. Nothing but the IP address of the computer. (Similar to the senders address in an envelope).
2. These Internet packets travel out of the computer and reach the modemthrough the Ethernet cable.

1. By default, these Internet packetsin the form of digital signals. The modem demodulates them into analog signals so it can travel through a telephone line. (Switching from a national highway to a city road).

1. From the modem, the packets travel in a telephone line and reach the local telephone loop, which is normally seen in every street of a country.

1. Then it reaches the near-by telephone exchange or central office of the ISP for a simple authentication process.

1. From the telephone exchange the data is then transmitted to an ATM(Asynchronous Transfer mode). The data is split into packets of equal sizes and then sent to the home Gateway.

1. From the Gateway the data packets reach the DNS in the Internet. The DNS identifies the IP address of the nearest Google web server, which can help the packets to travel further.

1. The data packets reach the web server with the IP address indicated by the DNS. Now Google server verifies if it is a valid request.

1. Based on the web request, Google searches the data base and retrieves the requested information. In our case, it’s just the home page of Google.

1. Now the Home page information is packed in the form of Internet packets and the IP address of the receiver is printed and sent back on the Internet.

The Internet packets travel back in the same route and reach the user. Thus the web page is displayed in the browser.