Connection between networks in towns, cities and countries are being upgraded to carry high speed computer traffic and are being further expanded using optical fibre technology to carry huge amounts of wideband, very high speed digital traffic. This enables fast transfer of large quantities of data and facilitates the use of high quality colour images, video and audio in network communications. Consequently, use is governed by self imposed protocols and polite behaviour. Internet services Internet supports a range of services, usually maintained, managed and controlled by the host network providing the service. These facilities include image libraries, document and database information and other library services.
Many organisations now provide research data and software for free use.
To access these facilities the user must be registered as a user on a network and have a valid network address. Internet use Until recently, access to network facilities and services required some skill as a programmer or at least a knowledge of command line instructions to effect the required data transfers. This was inevitably a major hurdle for the less computer literate user and was further complicated by the need to have a knowledge of the operating system commands for the computer network providing the data. Further, the user needed to know which computer held the information and what the address of the computer was before even a cursory search of the required information was possible. Network access was improved first through the extension of the command line to command line menu options.