Internet makes our lives so easy that has never been so before. There are billions of things that you can do with the internet. But ever wondered how internet works? How the data containing this article is reaching you? Let’s find out how Internet works.
All the data that contains every youtube video, blog, article, and everything you search on the internet reaches you from the Google data center thousands of kilometers away. Still, you can receive all your information within a fraction of seconds.
Also in these harsh times of the coronavirus pandemic, life without the internet will be unbelievable. All of our social media platforms will be nothing without the internet.
Know how this superfast service of the internet works and how you can send or receive the data so fast.
Working of the Internet
When you get anything from the internet, it has to be stored somewhere physically. The Google data center does this job.
It has trillions of bytes of free space in which everything you observe on the internet (google) has been stored.
The article you are reading now, any youtube video, files, etc. are stored on some hardware in the data center. But how does it reach your laptop or mobile phone?
This is because of an incredible journey of your data from the main data center to your device.
What is an IP address?
Let’s look at what an IP address is and how it works, which helps in understanding how internet works.
IP address is just like the specific location of your device. It is similar to your home address which is helpful to give you the right and only information you want.
The Internet Service Providers (ISP) will decide your IP address so that you can be uniquely identified. You can check your device’s properties to know your IP address.
It is just a very long and unique string of numbers that your computer knows.
On the other side, servers have their IP addresses and a website can store that server’s address on SSD (Solid State Drive). Your laptop also has SSDs to store data. So you can access any website just by writing its IP address on the Browsers.
It is impossible to remember all the website’s IP addresses so the domain names are given to websites such as youtube.com, facebook.com, etc.
Additionally,
we always use domain names instead of complex IP addresses. But how does the computer know which IP address is for which domain name?
Well, for this, the internet uses a gigantic phone book known as DNS (Deviated Nasal Septum). This works similarly as if you don’t know any person’s phone number but only name, then you can look into the phone book to get his/her number.
The DNS server provides the same service to the internet. Your Internet service providers (ISP) can manage the DNS server.
Hence these are all the big network of the internet which has billions of IP addresses and domain names. So an institution was known as ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) in the USA has been responsible for managing all of the domain names and services.
Let’s see how this incredible journey of data takes place through the satellite.
How do Satellite Networks work?
First, the thing that you want to search is sent to the database via a request which is automatically generated by the browsers.
Yes, that’s all the important part of your browsers, to make a CPU readable format request and send it to the database so that it can get that data.
There are many different types of browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Chrome Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and many more which mainly try to provide a good environment to search effectively and human friendly.
Working
- Suppose you want to open a website and you click on it.
- Then the browser will send the IP address of that website through internet connection or Wi-Fi in which the data is converted into electromagnetic waves and transmitted between your device and data center via satellites.
- The communication satellites help in these types of tasks.
- First the IP address sent by the browser is received to a nearer communication tower.
- That tower amplifies the signal and sends it to the satellite.
- The satellite receiving the data is then sent to the data center through another antenna on the satellite.
- This is how your data journey begins and reaches the data center.
- The data which is stored in SSD (Solid State Device) access the internal memory of a server.
- There are many servers located in the data center which helps to receive the IP address and finds the address where this data is stored.
- Servers have very complex algorithms which provides the most efficient and fastest way to get your data.
When the data is found, it is immediately transmitted back to the satellite.
The data of that IP address that is received by the receiver antenna is then sent to earth to your nearer communication/internet tower through the sender antenna.
This data is then reached to your mobile phones or laptops. The page that you want to load is then opened on your device and it has all that data that you might find.
That’s all. That’s how internet works. It seems simple but it is a very complicated process.
Thanks to the Complex Servers and day by day increasing internet speed which handles all this complex task very easily.
That’s why you would be able to receive tons of KBS of data within a fraction of seconds.
Drawbacks of Satellite Transmission
Although satellite transmission is a good technique to receive data, it has many flaws.
Telecommunication may be an easier task to be done with the satellite because it is transmitted through radio waves.
Radio waves can travel much longer without having any big loss to communication. That’s why all your phone calls are transmitted through the satellite.
But on the internet, it is different. The Internet or say Wi-Fi is electromagnetic waves propagation which is different from radio signals.
You may also have figured out the broadcast on the radio is quite often a bit noisy because waves traveling in the air will pick up some of the disturbance.
But it is not affordable on internet services.
Satellites are situated at an average distance of around 21000 miles from your nearer communication tower.
Hence it will have to travel around 42000 miles of long distance to reach the data center.
Double the distance and it will be the amount of distance in the whole process which is very time-consuming.
This also depends on which area you are located in.
But still, in the best-case scenario, you will not be able to load your website within several minutes or the data you receive may be broken or incomplete.
This is not just affordable at all and that is why Optical Fiber Cable Network is used.
How does Optical Fiber Network work?
So how does your data reach you within seconds? Thanks to a complex network known as Optical Fiber Network.
This network is connected through the optical fiber cables which are a cable grid that is placed underground and under the oceans traveling from one continent to another.
Optical fibers are made so that the data can be transmitted in the form of light waves. As obvious it is the fastest speed of communication one can achieve.
Your phone or laptop could be connected to the internet via a cellular network or Wi-Fi routers, which are responsible to transmit or receive the data.
If you are using cellular networks, then data is transmitted to a nearer internet tower router which is connected to a cable. If you are using Wi-Fi, then it is directly connected.
Then the process continues with the same procedure of sending IP address and receiving data of that address.
Just the difference here is that the place of the satellite is taken by optical fiber network and the air medium is changed to cables.
Protocols
Take an example in which posts are received through postal services.
Suppose someone misplaces or forgets to get the exact address on it, the post might be lost. It may never reach its destination.
Similarly in the world of the internet, the same problem can occur. To conquer this, Protocols are made.
Protocols are the sets and sets of rules which must be followed by every ISP.
This provides responsible clear path management for the data that is transmitted.
Rules for different routers, applications, web browsers, and internet service providers are all made in the protocols. Very well-known protocols are TCP/IP, HTTP/HTTPS, RTP, etc.
Conclusion
If users want to know how the internet works in brief, they should read this section. When users try to reach any particular domain from the web browser, they request root servers for the IP address of the particular site. Then the browser request the data from the data center using the IP address and the user gets the results.