How does the internet works?

The article you are reading now travelled thousands of miles from a Google Data Center to reach you. Let's learn how the internet works by getting to understand the details of this data's incredible journey. The data centre which can be thousands of miles away from you has your article stored inside it.how does this data reach your mobile phone or a laptop?
An easy way to achieve this goal would be with the use of satellites. From the data centre, a signal could be sent to the satellite via an antenna, and then from the satellite, a signal could be sent to your mobile phone via another antenna near to you.

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However, this way of transmitting signals is not a good idea. Let's see why. The satellite is parked nearly 22,000 miles above the earth's equator, so for the data transmission to be successful, the data would have to travel a total distance of 44,000 miles. Such a long distance of travel causes a significant delay in receiving the signal. More specifically it causes huge latency which is unacceptable for most internet applications so if this article does not reach you via a satellite then how does it get to you? Well, it is done with the help of a complicated network of optical fibre cables, which connect between the data centre and your device. Your phone could be connected to the internet via cellular data or any Wi-Fi router, but ultimately at some point, your phone will be connected to this network of optical fibre cables we saw at the beginning that the article you are currently reading is stored inside a data centre.

what is the data centre?

To be more specific, it is stored in a solid-state device within the data centre. This SSD acts as the internal memory of a server. The server is simply a powerful computer whose job is to provide you with the article or other stored content when you request it.

what is IP address?

Now the challenge is how to transfer the data stored in the data centre specifically to your device via the complex network of optical fibre cables. Let's see how this is done. Before proceeding further we should first understand an important concept which is the concept of an IP address. Every device that is connected to the Internet whether it is a server a computer or a mobile phone is identified uniquely by a string of numbers known as an IP address. You can consider the IP address similar to your home address that is the address, that uniquely identifies your home. Any letter sent to you reaches you precisely because of your home address. Similarly in the internet world, an IP address acts as a shipping address through which all information reaches its destination. Your internet service provider will decide the IP address of your device and you can see what IP address your ISP has given to your mobile phone or laptop. The server in the data centre also has an IP address. The server stores a website so you can access any website just by knowing the server's IP address. However, it is difficult for a person to remember so many IP addresses. So to solve this problem domain names likeyoutube.com, facebook.com etc are used which correspond to IP addresses which are easier for us to remember than the long sequence of numbers another thing to notice here is that a server has the capability of storing several websites and if the server consists of multiple websites all the websites cannot be accessed with the server's IP address. In such cases, additional pieces of information, host headers are used to uniquely identify the website. However, for the giant web sites like Facebook.com or YouTube.com, the entire data centre infrastructure will be dedicated to the storage of the particular website. To access the internet we always use domain names instead of the complex IP address numbers.

what is DNS server?

From where does the internet get IP addresses corresponding to our domain name requests.
Well, for this purpose the internet uses a huge phone book known as DNS. If you know a person's name, but don't know their telephone number you can simply look it up in a phone book. The DNS server provides the same service to the internet. Your internet service provider or other organizations can manage the DNS server. Let's have a recap of the whole operation. You enter the domain name, the browser sends a request to the DNS server to get the corresponding IP address.










After getting the IP address, your browser simply forwards the request to the data centre, more specifically to the respective server. Once the server gets a request to access a particular website the data flow starts. The data is transferred in digital format via optical fibre cables, more specifically in the form of light pulses. These light pulses sometimes have to travel thousands of miles via the optical fibre cable to reach their destination. During their journey, they often have to go through tough terrains such as hilly areas or under the sea. There are a few global companies who lay and maintain these optical cable networks. These visuals show how the laying of optical fibre cables is done with the help of a ship. A plough is dropped deep into the sea from the ship, and this plough creates a trench on the seabed and to which places the optical fibre cable. This complex optical cable network is the backbone of the Internet. These optical fibre cables carrying the light are stretched across the seabed to your doorstep where they are connected to a router. The router converts these light signals to electrical signals. An Ethernet cable is then used to transmit the electrical signals to your computers.
However, if you are accessing the Internet using cellular data, from the optical cable the signal has to be sent to a cell tower and from the cell tower, the signal reaches your cell phone in the form of electromagnetic waves.





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