What is the Internet ?
Tags: internet, beginners, tutorial, webdev
Published: 2023-10-06 21:04:27

## Introduction

We use internet every-day to watch videos, send text-messages, upload posts on social media, watch cooking-recipe, listen to our favourite music and even to study!!! 

Internet has become an integral part of our life as we are heavily dependant on it for various tasks. We get frustrated when our internet connection goes down and curse our service-provider as most of our activities stops and are happy when we come back online !!

Now as you are curious about what the internet is and how does it work let's discuss that !! 

## The Internet 

**Internet** is a large-network of devices which consists of devices all over the world. 

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 Note :
     _A network is a group of devices that are connected to each-other(wired or wireless) to share data between them._

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Before we understand what is internet let me ask you one question.. why do we need internet? The answer is already mentioned above **to watch movies, send messages, etc.**  

Let's consider any messaging application, suppose I want to send a text message to my mother, what do I do? I would open the messaging application, type a message and hit the send button to deliver the message. After few seconds the message will be sent to the reciever. 

### But How? 
How can a message reach my mother's phone with just one click? Is this magic ? **Noo..** !! we need a link between the communicating objects. 

Let's take a simple analogy to understand the concept. Suppose, we want to transfer water from **one big tank** to the **another tank**, _how do we do it_? The easiest way to do this is to connect them with a pipe and turn on the tap to fill the container. Here the water flows _through the pipe_ and most importantly they both **are connected **!!!.

Similarly the two devices are also connected to each other in some-way (will discuss in the next section) and that makes it possible to send _data_ from one point to the other.

### How devices are connected?

To explain the above case lets start with the simple example. 

Suppose our phone is out-of-storage and we need to free some space to make it work faster, deleting all files is not always the solution because it might contain some data like pictures, document which we don't want to loose. 

Other option is to transfer files to our storage-unit like HDD/SSD. To do this we connect our phone and Hard-Drive to the laptop using a cable and then transfer the files.

HURRAY!!! we have established some link between the devices through **wired-connection** that helped us to transfer data between them. Similarly we can connect any two-devices with a single cable, **but....** what if we have more than 2-3 devices, according to this logic each device would need a dedicated connection (different port and wires for each connection) with another device so that all can communicate with each other. 

Suppose we have 4 devices then for each device **3 cables** hence total of **12** cables would required for communication. 

Aahh!! Imagine if the number of devices continues to grow, you can't even imagine connecting them with those many wires :|

### Routers : 

To solve the above issue we can use a **router**. A router is a _networking device_ that connects several devices and its responsibilty is to send data from source device to the mentioned destination device .In this way the number of cables required will be same as the number of devices which is far better than having the dedicated connection for each device. 

In this way we connect devices to create a **network**.

Since router is also a computer-system we can have connection betweeen two-routers to establish connection between two different networks and forming a **larger-network**.

## Connecting to the world

Now we understood how a network is established and how it can grow, but how can we connect our device from a local-network to the world. One way is to connect to every possible network which will help to establish the connection.

But that's not the solution as there can be millions of network around the world and to have a dedicated connection from our local-network to all of them is not possible.

### Existing World-wide-network

What if I tell you that there is already a network which connects the world (telephone network, optical fiber cable). Optical fiber cables covers the vast-geographic regions (installed under the sea - connecting continents !!) to connect the world, facilitating international communication and data transfer. 

### How can we connect to this network ?

As mentioned earlier telephone networks have already connected the world and the end point of connection is available in our homes, we can connect our device to that network with the modem (to get the suitable type of signal forour device and to convert the signal back to its original form for transmission over the network).

Devices from all over the world are thus connected to this massive network making the world a global-village and this network is called **THE INTERNET**.

## But how the devices communicate with each another ?

Until now we have done it on the internet!! But the most important part yet to be discussed is how the devices communicate with each other. 

We have seen that in local-network routers make it possible to send the data from between two devices,but what about the internet? Our local router can just send data to the internet (through modem) but how can it reach the proper destination present in some other part of the world ?

### Here comes the Internet Service Providers (ISP)

We take monthly/yearly subscription for internet-access from the **Service-Providers**. But why?

The ISP makes it possible for us to send data from source to any destination in the world. The ISP's have their own network of special-routers over the internet which makes end-to-end communication possible and they are also linked to other ISP's routers.  

This is the reason we subscribe to the ISP's to get this amazing facility that has become a basic necessity.

### How to identity the devices ?

There are billions of devices all over the world, so how to identify the correct destination-device. 

Similarly to how a place is identified with it's co-ordinates (which is unique) devices are also identified with some-unique property called the IP(Internet Protocol) Address, each device that is connected to this device has a unique IP so with that the devices in the internet are identified.

Generally IP's contains series of numbers seperated by '.' like **142.250.192.14** (IP-address of google at time of writing this blog). 

Note : This is the simpler explanation, in reality there are several protocols (**TCP/IP, UDP**) that are followed to complete the entire process.


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 I hope after reading this blog you must have got the idea of what the internet is, how the devices connect to form a network and overview of how the devices communicate. 

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