Just like our body needs oxygen to breathe, we need the internet for both our personal and professional lives to function properly. So our level of dependency has come to the point that a world without the internet is quite unimaginable. With the advent of better internet service providers with genuine offers and affordable rates, high-speed internet is easily available everywhere. The bundling trend has further added to the convenience of people. For instance, subscribers of Xfinity bundles know that they can enjoy high-quality internet, TV, and/or phone services with impressive discounts and the ease of managing them over a single bill.
However, have you ever wondered how such a massive amount of information gets shared on the internet? You come across a query, you type it and click the search button, and voila, you get every type of related information in front of you. Interesting isn’t it? So without any further ado, let’s check out further details about how does information travels on the internet. Dive in!
How does Data Travel on the Internet?
Data travels in the form of packets consisting of nearly 1500 bytes. The wrapper around these packets notifies the computers about the kind of data in them. When an email is sent, the message breaks into packets and travel through the network. This means that different packets from the same message can follow different paths. This is why the internet is so fast. A soon as the packets arrive at the receiving computer, they are assembled and the message is created again.
Thus all the data is processed through the internet and helps manage the traffic since if one path is overcrowded with traffic, you can use the other route. If one packet does not reach the receiving end, the machine will send a message notifying the missing data packet and ask the machine at the sending end, to resend it within a few milliseconds. This creates redundancy.
What path does Data Follow across the Internet?
The data packets ate chunks of chopped information and each data packet can move along the network, in the form of hops. Once the data is sent by a machine at the sending end, it is received by the router. From here the packets continue the journey over cables and have their address and thus will follow the DNS signals. The Domain Name Servers or DNS direct the packets where to go. So it information traveling in the form of data packets is more like a parcel traveling through highways and roads to reach its destination but in the case of the internet, it happens in a couple of milliseconds.
How Fast Does Data Travel on the Internet?
In the case of fiber optic cable, a data packet can travel as fast as 200,000 km per second. That is a lot of speed. Just to give an idea, this means that the fiber optic packet can go around the earth 5 times. But wait, this is not it. Some packets can move even faster than air. So, these packets can travel as much as seven times across the globe with just a blink of an eye.
Who is the owner of the Internet?
The best part about the internet is the fact that there is no single owner. No government, organization, or company owns it or can close it.
But yes the internet relies on hardware. Many companies provide the hardware so that the internet can function smoothly. An internet service provider, for instance, possesses certain servers, routers, etc to make the internet work. They in turn can be connected to another company.
Only if all the companies together switch off, the internet would shut down. But that would not happen since they make heaps of money from it.
Benefits of Information Sharing
Data was frequently stored in silos and mostly not shared with other bodies, due to non-compatible formats or other reasons. However these issues have been sorted out and now information sharing between networks is more common, particularly when it comes to social media. Billions of people access and share information over these social networking sites.
The government of the US and others have worked to improve their resources and make information sharing more effective to avert any threats and make it easier to react on time.
Wrapping Up
The aforementioned discussion explains how data travels across the internet. If used wisely, information sharing is a gift and can help combat danger.
Comment Policy
Your words are your own, so be nice and helpful if you can. Please, only use your REAL NAME, not your business name or keywords. Using business name or keywords instead of your real name will lead to the comment being deleted. Anonymous commenting is not allowed either. Limit the amount of links submitted in your comment. We accept clean XHTML in comments, but don't overdo it please. You can wrap code in [lang-name][/lang-name] tags.