IP stands for “internet Protocol”, so an IP address is an “internet Protocol address”. © 2005-2021 Mozilla and individual contributors. This router has only one job: like a signaler at a railway station, it makes sure that a message sent from a given computer arrives at the right destination computer. The packets traveled to our router, through Comcast’s network north to Seattle, before being routed onto a Tata Communications (as6453.net) backbone network through Chicago, New York, and Newark before making their way to a Linode data center in Newark, New Jersey where the website is hosted. The Internet & Your Website. When using a WAP-enabled device for Internet access, the device sends out radio waves searching for a connection with the service provider. Of course a single router can't scale that far, but, if you read carefully, we said that a router is a computer like any other, so what keeps us from connecting two routers together? Now I'll explain how the overall system works. Other types of hardware that support the Internet include routers, servers, cell phone towers, satellites, radios, smartphones and other devices. Servers are where most of the information on the internet "lives". The above article may contain affiliate links, which help support How-To Geek. Through the use of a protocol stack. The video you are watching now traveled thousands of miles from a Google data center to reach you. Your computer can’t directly send a piece of information, or “packet” of data, to the computer hosting the website. By submitting your email, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The history of the Internet is somewhat obscure. The Internet works because open standards allow every network to connect to every other network. You work for a company or start your own, and the work you do earns you money, which you spend on things like a mortgage, rent, food, clothing, utilities and entertainment. Looking to get paid or earn some extra money? You probably use your internet service provider’s DNS service, but you can choose to use another DNS server like Google Public DNS or OpenDNS. The Internet is an infrastructure, whereas the Web is a service built on top of the infrastructure. Therefore, this can be definitely said that the Internet is not a single network, but a collection of networks. While the internet uses many technical terms, the way it works is actually rather simple. RELATED: What's the Difference Between TCP and UDP? The routers along the path use something called the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, to communicate information about whether a network is down and the optimal path for data to take. Internetworking is only possible when the all the connected networks use the same protocol stack or communication methodologies. There’s also a lot of software at work in the background, allowing you to type in a website address like “google.com” and have your computer to send information to the physical location where that website is located in the fastest way possible. The Internet works the same way -- if only one person is downloading one file, the transfer should happen fairly quickly. TCP is all about reliability, and devices chat back and forth and track packets of data to ensure nothing gets lost along the way. Rookie is no longer publishing new content, but we hope you'll continue to enjoy the archives, or books, and the community you've helped to create. Instead, it passes a packet to your home router with information about where it’s going and where the web server should reply. This course explores how the internet works, including the composition and transmission of data packets over both Local and Wide Area Networks. Internet (and most computer networks) are sent in manageable chunks. 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