How Internet Works About two-thirds of the world’s population, which means more than 5 billion people, use the Internet.
Internet-based social media is currently considered to be the fastest and most authentic source for timely access to information. According to an estimate, there are currently about 2 billion websites that are providing relevant information or entertainment to Internet users.
But have you ever wondered how the internet works? How are these billions of Internet users and 2 billion websites connected? Who owns the Internet and who can control the Internet? Answers to the interesting questions related to this subject are the subject of our article today.
Friends the current form of the Internet, which we are familiar with
is being run by a global network of millions of computers that are connected to this network in the form of different layers.
whether it is online shopping or using social media, getting information on any topic, or playing online games use of the internet is seen in almost every sector of the world.
To view any content on the Internet, one has to visit a specific website, where the content is available.
How to get a website name?
Who registers our website and controls and manages websites on the Internet?
To know the answers to these questions, it is very important to know some basic concepts of the Internet. The data for that video playing on your screen is stored in a Google or YouTube data center which may be thousands of kilometers away from you.
The long journey of this video data from its source i.e. data center to end user
i.e. mobile or laptop screen is very interesting and unbelievable.
Any content on the Internet that reaches us is stored in a data storage device
such as a solid state device (SSD) within the respective data center.
Just like our laptop’s hard disk, this SSD acts as the internal memory of a powerful computer, called a server.
The server’s job is to serve video or other stored content to the user upon request.
Now the challenge is how to transfer the data stored in the data center to your device.
What is an Internet Protocol Address
Friends, to understand this process of the internet first we understand the concept of IP i.e. Internet Protocol Address.
Every device that is connected to the Internet, whether it is a server, computer, or mobile phone
is uniquely identified by a sequence of numbers called an IP address.
Just as the unique identifier of your home is your home address
and every letter sent to you reaches you because of your home address
in the Internet world, an IP address is a shipping address and acts as a conduit through which all information reaches its destination.
Your mobile phone or laptop is assigned an IP address by your internet service provider.
Similarly, a server in a data center also has an IP address.
The server can be your own computer or laptop, but large websites require a separate and powerful server to store data.
And for websites like Google or YouTube, an entire data center is dedicated to storage.
Since the server stores the website, you can access a website only by knowing the IP address of the server.
Now it is very difficult for a single person to remember so many IP addresses
so to solve this problem, domain names like youtube.com or, facebook.com, etc. are used which correspond to the IP address.
Now the question arises where the Internet gets the IP addresses corresponding to our domain name?
For this purpose, the Internet uses a huge phone book called DNS (Domain Name System).
Just as your mobile phone stores a person’s name with their mobile number
the DNS server provides an IP address corresponding to a domain name.
In short, when you type a domain name into your web browser
the browser sends a request to the DNS server to get the corresponding IP address.
After obtaining the IP address your browser sends the request to get the data to the server at the respective data center
once the server receives the request to access a particular website, the data flow starts.
Friends, the question must have come to your mind who assigns this domain name?
A domain name means a single website worldwide, so someone has to register and manage it.
Let’s try to find out the answer.
Any website link has two main parts, a domain name, and a top-level domain.
For example in www.youtube.com, the “YouTube” is the domain name, and dotcom (.com) is the top-level domain.
Whenever you create a website of your own, you have to register its domain name.
Similarly, a web server is also required to store the content on the website, which we have already mentioned.
There are some websites that provide their services to store your website data,
they are called hosting websites.
The organization responsible for domain name registration and management of the entire domain name system, i.e. DNS, is ICANN
ICANN means internet corporation for assigned names and numbers has a very important role in the internet world.
ICANN decides which top-level domains are allowed.
There are formal biddings for top-level domains, and companies that buy top-level domains are called registries.
like the “dot com” domain is owned by a company called Verisign.
Next come registrars, such as domain.com or godaddy.com.
ICANN manages the Domain Name System (DNS) through its certified domain registrars.
The registrars themselves do not own the top-level domain
but are authorized by ICANN to sell and register your desired domain name to you.
What is the Internet Assigned Number Authority
Friends with similar IP addresses are managed by The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority i.e. IANA which is a subsidiary of ICAN.
It is important to standardize the Internet in such a way that a person sitting in the world
whether he is in New York, Beijing or Lahore, his website is accessible to all Internet users of the world
And this is only possible if the storage of these websites on the Internet and the system of data transmission to the users are the same all over the world
It seems that with its extensive powers, ICANN can completely control the Internet and hence the owner of the internet.
But friends, it’s not like that.
ICAN is certainly a regulatory authority, but the Internet itself is a very decentralized network
but rather a collection of many separate networks.
Any computer that is connected to the Internet makes up the Internet
and thus every computer or server in this network is connected to each other like a net
Hence it can be said that “No one owns the Internet and everyone owns the Internet”.
Friends, let’s try to find out how all internet users and websites servers of the world are connected to each other
and how data transmission takes place between them.
Friends, an easy way to transmit data from one place to another can be using a satellite.
From the data center, a signal can be sent to a satellite through an antenna
, and then a signal from the satellite can be sent to your mobile phone through another antenna near you.
But this method of data transmission is not so suitable due to various reasons.
The satellite is located at a distance of about 36000 km from the earth’s equator.
So for data transmission to be successful, the data has to travel a total distance of 72000 km.
Such a long distance causes a significant delay in signal reception, which is unacceptable for most Internet applications.
Moreover, bad weather affects this communication.
Apart from this, lack of bandwidth and other technical issues also hinder this form of communication.
Because Internet communication on such a large scale via satellite is not very suitable
we now show you how it all actually happens in practice.
For this purpose, there is an extensive system of optical fibers through which digital data is transmitted in the form of light pulses.
The entire optical fiber network in the world is divided into three different levels called tiers.
All the continents and countries of the world are connected through optical fiber at tier 1.
During this phase, they often have to pass through difficult terrain such as mountains or under the sea.
Popular tier 1 ISPs include AT&T, NTT, Verizon, and TATA Communications.
Below that, tier 2 ISPs work to connect different states or provinces and cities within countries.
This is followed by tier 3 ISPs that only connect users in a specific area
and are connected to the tier 2 and finally tier 1 network at the backend.
It is important to understand that there are some countries including Pakistan where the tier 3 network is established with copper wires instead of optical fiber.
But as soon as you connect to the Internet, somewhere you are definitely connected to this main network of optical fiber.
If you access the internet using cellular i.e. mobile data or any wireless internet device,
in such cases, the signal or data is first sent to the mobile tower through an optical cable
and then the data is transmitted by electromagnetic waves to your cell phone or internet device.
Similarly, the wireless router used in our homes also wirelessly transmits the signal coming through the cable to your mobile or laptop.
Thus, all internet users in the world are somehow connected to this vast network of optical fiber
and are also connected to each other through this network.
Through optical fiber, data is sent in the form of packets and different protocols are used for this.
Protocols prescribe rules for associating source and destination addresses with data packets and their security.
The Internet is undoubtedly a modern medium of information, entertainment, and communication.
In today’s informative video, we understand the technology of the Internet and learn who is involved in building and managing this vast network.
We also learned, how any content reaches us through the internet.