This article is reaching you through a wire in the ocean…
And so is the rest of the internet….
Surfing the internet all day? Ever wondered how the data from different countries reach you?
What if I tell you 99% of the data you access on the internet is traveling under the vast oceans and then reaching you?
You use the internet all day but ever wondered how are you able to access websites which are on servers sitting in the US or any other country?
1. Whenever we have to travel to a different country, we generally take a flight. A direct flight from India to the US takes about 15 hours. How is the content you are surfing reaching you in just a fraction of a second?
2. Before we understand that, let’s first understand what the internet is. The Internet is a network of networks. A big network is formed by connecting various small networks. But, how are these networks connected?
3. You are connected to your wifi which is connected to a wire. That wire is a LAN cable which is further connected to another wire which is extending through the poles and going somewhere. That big wire is generally a fiber optic cable. A fiber optic cable transmits signals in the form of light through reflections on the glass surface inside.
4. This fiber optic cable is mostly going to one of the offices of your internet service providers. These are generally various telecom companies. The physical connection through the phone network to the Internet Service Provider might have been easy to guess, but beyond that might bear some explanation.
5. After your packets traverse the phone network and your ISP’s local equipment, they are routed onto the ISP’s backbone or a backbone the ISP buys bandwidth from. The Internet backbone is made up of many large networks which interconnect with each other. These large networks are known as Network Service Providers or NSPs. Some of the large NSPs are UUNet, CerfNet, IBM, BBN Planet, SprintNet, PSINet, as well as others. These networks peer with each other to exchange packet traffic.
6. But, where are these backbones, and in what forms? Are they transmitting content through some wave or electricity? What form? There is a huge network of fiber optics cables running on the seawater bed wrapping the whole world. These are laid down by cable ships that carry around 2000–3000 KM long cables. These ships are generally owned by big telecom providers in the world.
Want to know in more detail?
Here is the video: https://lnkd.in/grcVuKPq
