CC 101

LESSON ROPER
WHAT IS THE INTERNET?
The Internet is a global network of billions of computers and other electronic devices. With the Internet, it's possible to
access almost any information, communicate with anyone else in the world, and do much more.
You can do all of this by connecting a computer to the Internet, which is also called going online. When someone says a
computer is online, it's just another way of saying it's connected to the Internet.

What is the Web?

The World Wide Web—usually called the Web for short—is a collection of different websites you can access through the
Internet. A website is made up of related text, images, and other resources. Websites can resemble other forms of
media—like newspaper articles or television programs—or they can be interactive in a way that's unique to computers.
The purpose of a website can be almost anything: a news platform, an advertisement, an online library, a forum for sharing
images, or an educational site like us!
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Once you are connected to the Internet, you can access and view websites using a type of application called a web
browser. Just keep in mind that the web browser itself is not the Internet; it only displays websites that are stored on the
Internet.

How does the Internet work?

At this point you may be wondering, how does the Internet work? The exact answer is pretty complicated and
would take a while to explain. Instead, let's look at some of the most important things you should know.
It's important to realize that the Internet is a global network of physical cables, which can include copper telephone wires,
TV cables, and fiber optic cables. Even wireless connections like Wi-Fi and 3G/4G rely on these physical cables to access
the Internet.
When you visit a website, your computer sends a request over these wires to a server. A server is where websites
are stored, and it works a lot like your computer's hard drive. Once the request arrives, the server retrieves the website
and sends the correct data back to your computer. What's amazing is that this all happens in just a few seconds!
Watch the video below from Tata Communications to learn more about how the Internet functions.

Other things you can do on the Internet

One of the best features of the Internet is the ability to communicate almost instantly with anyone in the
world. Email is one of the oldest and most universal ways to communicate and share information on the Internet, and
billions of people use it. Social media allows people to connect in a variety of ways and build communities online.

There are many other things you can do on the Internet. There are thousands of ways to keep up with news or shop for
anything online. You can pay your bills, manage your bank accounts, meet new people, watch TV, or learn new skills.
You can learn or do almost anything online.

INTERNET PROTOCOL SUITE

The Internet standards describe a framework known as the Internet protocol suite (also called TCP/IP, based on
the first two components.) This is a model architecture that divides methods into a layered system of protocols, originally
documented in RFC 1122 and RFC 1123.
Layers
The software layers correspond to the environment or scope in which their services operate. At the top is
the application layer, space for the application-specific networking methods used in software applications. For example, a
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web browser program uses the client-server application model and a specific protocol of interaction between servers and
clients, while many file-sharing systems use a peer-to-peer paradigm.
Internet protocol
The most prominent component of the Internet model is the Internet Protocol (IP). IP enables internetworking and,
in essence, establishes the Internet itself. Two versions of the Internet Protocol exist, IPV4 and IPV6.
IPv4
Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) defines an IP address as a 32-bit number. Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) is
the initial version used on the first generation of the Internet and is still in dominant use. It was designed to address up to
≈4.3 billion (109) hosts. However, the explosive growth of the Internet has led to IPv4 address exhaustion, which entered
its final stage in 2011, when the global IPv4 address allocation pool was exhausted.
IPv6
Because of the growth of the Internet and the depletion of available IPv4 addresses, a new version of IP IPv6, was
developed in the mid-1990s, which provides vastly larger addressing capabilities and more efficient routing of Internet
traffic. IPv6 uses 128 bits for the IP address and was standardized in 1998. IPv6 deployment has been ongoing since the
mid-2000s. IPv6 is currently in growing deployment around the world, since Internet address registries (RIRs) began to
urge all resource managers to plan rapid adoption and conversion.
Subnetwork
A subnetwork or subnet is a logical subdivision of an IP network. The practice of dividing a network into two or more
networks is called subnetting.
Computers that belong to a subnet are addressed with an identical most-significant bit-group in their IP addresses. This
results in the logical division of an IP address into two fields, the network number or routing prefix and the rest field or host
identifier. The rest field is an identifier for a specific host or network interface.
IETF
While the hardware components in the Internet infrastructure can often be used to support other software systems,
it is the design and the standardization process of the software that characterizes the Internet and provides the foundation
for its scalability and success.

INTERNET APPLICATION

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a global collection of documents, images, multimedia, applications, and other resources,
logically interrelated by hyperlinks and referenced with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), which provide a global system
of named references. URIs symbolically identifies services, web servers, databases, and the documents and resources
that they can provide. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the main access protocol of the World Wide Web. Web
services also use HTTP for communication between software systems for information transfer, sharing and exchanging
business data and logistic and is one of many languages or protocols that can be used for communication on the Internet.
World Wide Web browser software, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer/Edge, Mozilla
Firefox, Opera, Apple's Safari, and Google Chrome, lets users navigate from one web page to another via the hyperlinks
embedded in the documents. These documents may also contain any combination of computer data, including graphics,
sounds, text, video, multimedia and interactive content that runs while the user is interacting with the page. Client-side
software can include animations, games, office applications and scientific demonstrations. Through keyword-
driven Internet research using search engines like Yahoo!, Bing and Google, users worldwide have easy, instant access
to a vast and diverse amount of online information. Compared to printed media, books, encyclopedias and traditional
libraries, the World Wide Web has enabled the decentralization of information on a large scale.
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The Web has enabled individuals and organizations to publish ideas and information to a potentially
large audience online at greatly reduced expense and time delay. Publishing a web page, a blog, or building a website
involves little initial cost and many cost-free services are available. However, publishing and maintaining large,
professional web sites with attractive, diverse and up-to-date information is still a difficult and expensive proposition. Many
individuals and some companies and groups use web logs or blogs, which are largely used as easily updatable online
diaries. Some commercial organizations encourage staff to communicate advice in their areas of specialization in the hope
that visitors will be impressed by the expert knowledge and free information, and be attracted to the corporation as a result.
Communication
Email is an important communications service available via the Internet. The concept of sending electronic text
messages between parties, analogous to mailing letters or memos, predates the creation of the Internet. Pictures,
documents, and other files are sent as email attachments. Email messages can be cc-ed to multiple email addresses.
Internet telephony is a common communications service realized with the Internet. The name of the principle
internetworking protocol, the Internet Protocol, lends its name to voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The idea began in
the early 1990s with walkie-talkie-like voice applications for personal computers. VoIP systems now dominate many
markets, and are as easy to use and as convenient as a traditional telephone. The benefit has been in substantial cost
savings over traditional telephone calls, especially over long distances. Cable, ADSL, and mobile data networks
provide Internet access in customer premises and inexpensive VoIP network adapters provide the connection for
traditional analog telephone sets. The voice quality of VoIP often exceeds that of traditional calls. Remaining problems for
VoIP include the situation that emergency services may not be universally available, and that devices rely on a local power
supply, while older traditional phones are powered from the local loop, and typically operate during a power failure.
Data transfer
File sharing is an example of transferring large amounts of data across the Internet. A computer file can be emailed
to customers, colleagues and friends as an attachment. It can be uploaded to a website or File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
server for easy download by others. It can be put into a "shared location" or onto a file server for instant use by colleagues.
The load of bulk downloads to many users can be eased by the use of "mirror" servers or peer-to-peer networks. In any
of these cases, access to the file may be controlled by user authentication, the transit of the file over the Internet may be
obscured by encryption, and money may change hands for access to the file. The price can be paid by the remote charging
of funds from, for example, a credit card whose details are also passed—usually fully encrypted—across the Internet. The
origin and authenticity of the file received may be checked by digital signatures or by MD5 or other message digests.
These simple features of the Internet, over a worldwide basis, are changing the production, sale, and distribution of
anything that can be reduced to a computer file for transmission. This includes all manner of print publications, software
products, news, music, film, video, photography, graphics and the other arts. This in turn has caused seismic shifts in each
of the existing industries that previously controlled the production and distribution of these products.
Streaming media is the real-time delivery of digital media for the immediate consumption or enjoyment by end users.
Many radio and television broadcasters provide Internet feeds of their live audio and video productions. They may also
allow time-shift viewing or listening such as Preview, Classic Clips and Listen Again features. These providers have been
joined by a range of pure Internet "broadcasters" who never had on-air licenses. This means that an Internet-connected
device, such as a computer or something more specific, can be used to access on-line media in much the same way as
was previously possible only with a television or radio receiver. The range of available types of content is much wider,
from specialized technical webcasts to on-demand popular multimedia services. Podcasting is a variation on this theme,
where—usually audio—material is downloaded and played back on a computer or shifted to a portable media player to be
listened to on the move. These techniques using simple equipment allow anybody, with little censorship or licensing control,
to broadcast audio-visual material worldwide.
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Digital media streaming increases the demand for network bandwidth. For example, standard image quality needs
1 Mbit/s link speed for SD 480p, HD 720p quality requires 2.5 Mbit/s, and the top-of-the-line HDX quality needs 4.5 Mbit/s
for 1080p.
Webcams are a low-cost extension of this phenomenon. While some webcams can give full-frame-rate video, the
picture either is usually small or updates slowly. Internet users can watch animals around an African waterhole, ships in
the Panama Canal, traffic at a local roundabout or monitor their own premises, live and in real time. Video chat
rooms and video conferencing are also popular with many uses being found for personal webcams, with and without two-
way sound. YouTube was founded on 15 February 2005 and is now the leading website for free streaming video with more
than two billion users. It uses an HTML5 based web player by default to stream and show video files. Registered users
may upload an unlimited amount of video and build their own personal profile. YouTube claims that its users watch
hundreds of millions, and upload hundreds of thousands of videos daily.