Starting at Frank's house, we will send a request to retrieve the home page of The University of Sidney, Australia. Our request is sent from the modem out onto the phone line. Our request moves along the phone line to the local telephone company, which could be either Ameritech, GTE, or Gallatin River in our area. When our request reaches the local telephone company, it passes through cross connects that connect the telephone wires to the system. Then our request departs the telephone company on the line to the Internet Service Provider, which is Essex in this case.
Sprint routes our request to the Internet.
Then Bay Networks, Inc. routes our request to The University of Sidney, Australia. Now the server at The University of Sidney, Australia has to process our request and send the web page back to us. In general, the process will simply be in reverse order. To see a Flash animation of the process, click here . Our request will travel half way around the world and back again in less than one second for free.