How does the internet work? =)

[htmlmasterdave]

Basically what I want to know is who owns all the cables in the ground and all the routers... how are they payed for? How is North America linked to other parts of the world? That sorta thing I have a rough idea of how it basically works but I don't know the specifics, if anyone knows all this that would be really sweet. TIA

 

[Coquito]

Many companies across the globe, along with some governments own their share of the hardware. Verizon owns most of the physical lines here along the north east, with RCN currently building alot of the newer fiber lines for future use. All the other companies in the area, basically rent the lines from these guys. That is probably the situation in most places; one or two big corporations or governments own the hardware, & they make a living by renting it to each isp. It takes major collateral to put down your own lines.

I'm sure there is some major sub sea-floor cabling going on between continents. Never really heard much about it though.

Maybe if mr. Gore would drop by, he could tell us more about it.

 

[htmlmasterdave]

So satellites aren't really used much to route traffic between continents?

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: htmlmasterdave
So satellites aren't really used much to route traffic between continents?

not at all...way too slow.

 

[JackMDS]

Link to: How Does the Internet Work?

:light:

 

[bgroff]

Originally posted by: htmlmasterdave
Basically what I want to know is who owns all the cables in the ground and all the routers... how are they payed for? How is North America linked to other parts of the world? That sorta thing I have a rough idea of how it basically works but I don't know the specifics, if anyone knows all this that would be really sweet. TIA

Various telcos own the fiber in the ground. Some of the telcos are the old school Baby Bells. Some of the telcos are relatively new upstarts. The backbone switching equipment is owned by telcos. All of this is financed by the fees payed to ISPs. The smaller ones pay the big ones who pay the bigger ones who pay the tier 1 providers. North America is connected to Europe, Asia, Australia, and Latin America via trans-ocean fiber optic cables. There is a whole specialized industry surrounding those connections...

As for satellites, they are not the primary choice for large bandwidth transmission since it takes quite a bit of spectrum for high capacity transmission as well as the nasty delay added. Satellite connections allow for that rare breed of "high bandwidth-high delay."

Originally posted by: JackMDS
Link to: How Does the Internet Work?

:light:

Holy man, is that link out of date!!! Just looking at the subchapter titles made me feel like I was in a time-warp to 1997... They actually mentioned gopher. And veronica. And WAIS. Its like stepping into the Internet Wayback machine...

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
Link to: How Does the Internet Work?

:light:

Holy man, is that link out of date!!! Just looking at the subchapter titles made me feel like I was in a time-warp to 1997... They actually mentioned gopher. And veronica. And WAIS. Its like stepping into the Internet Wayback machine...[/quote]Yeah. So is a lot of Internet related material. In the Old good days people wrote good info and put it free for every one. Today when some one writes some thing Good they want ?money?.

There are people that publish Newsletters Directing you to Free programs, but the Newsletters is are free, Duh! :brokenheart:

 

[dmcowen674]

Originally posted by: htmlmasterdave
Basically what I want to know is who owns all the cables in the ground and all the routers... how are they payed for? How is North America linked to other parts of the world? That sorta thing I have a rough idea of how it basically works but I don't know the specifics, if anyone knows all this that would be really sweet. TIA

A handful of Companies made up most of the Internet "Backbone" like UUNet. Mostly Fiber optic rings around the major cities with main trunk lines between States. Same for the rest of the world. There are 13 Super Hubs worldwide that have the main Routers that contain the "Naming Tables" so URL's like Anandtech.com works.

Most of the main infrastructure was put together in Virginia, the International Community (ICANN) is trying to take Control (recently UN trying to step in too) but they have never been fully able to get their act together which is scary so really don't ever want them to gain control of this important Global resource.

There are actually two Backbones now, a super high speed link mainly between the biggest Universities in the world and they are running version 6 of the Internet Protocol.

The U.S. is 11th worldwide as far as tapping into the Internet with High Speed (DSL and Cable) and dropping fast. A few years ago we were third, then last year 8th. Other Countries are connecting at higher speeds and lower cost.

We are too Politically busy giving our Phone/DSL and Cable Monopolies more control and getting more money out of us through bogus rate increases.

 

[bgroff]

Originally posted by: dmcowen674

A handful of Companies made up most of the Internet "Backbone" like UUNet. Mostly Fiber optic rings around the major cities with main trunk lines between States. Same for the rest of the world. There are 13 Super Hubs worldwide that have the main Routers that contain the "Naming Tables" so URL's like Anandtech.com works.

Okay, so there are 13 root name servers. These are what helps resolve things like www.anandtech.com. But they have nothing to do with the layer 3 routing of packets. And to my knowledge, none of them reside at the major ISP peering points (MAE-East, MAE-West, the Chicago NAP, etc)... There is such a thing as a route server, however. That is usually a Unix based machine running some sort of GateD varient and is the BGP route server.

There are actually two Backbones now, a super high speed link mainly between the biggest Universities in the world and they are running version 6 of the Internet Protocol.

Well, yes there is the Internet2 backbone in the US. And yes, it does interconnect Universities and major research centers. But like everything else, the main routed protocol is still IPv4 across this backbone. They offer IPv6, but it is not a requirement for a node to actually use IPv6 in order to use Internet2.

 

[htmlmasterdave]

You guys keep mentioning IPv6.... when will this come into full swing? Also what are the differences between them anyways? I know Ipv6 allows more addresses than IPv4 but other than that are there any real differences? Thanks for the info about the main pipes etc., it's good background knowledge