When you use the Internet,
what happens?
Whether you go online to chat with a friend, or send mail, or buy a book, or
check the weather, watch a movie, or study the Peloponnesian War, it feels
like there's one wire connecting you directly to the thing you want. But a
billion other people are connecting to a billion other things at the same
time. How does that happen? It's really about making agreements. Think of
networking as a game. It only works if we agree to play by the rules. Otherwise
it's not much fun. If you can get two or more computers to play together, you have a network. If your
friend can do too, there's another network. But if can both agree that your networks
will play the same way now you can hook the two together. You have an
internetwork. The rules we play by are call the Internet Protocol and as long
as we all agree, we can keep adding more devices and more networks until the
whole world is connected.
That's what the internet is: a network of networks that share each other.
Every device on the Internet has its own unique address. Anything you send via
Internet is really just a message from one device to another but it doesn't
travel in one big block.
It gets pulverized into tiny packets of data, each one wrapped with info about
what it is, where it came from, and where it's going. This way your one message
can actually take several different paths to its destinations. Then by
following the protocol the receiving device knows how to put it all back
together. The strength of the internet is that it's decentralized. With so many
possible connections there is no single point of failure. If one path gets overloaded or
broken, your data just takes a different path. Even if a big chunk of the internet
gets wiped out, your message can still find its way. But let's say you use one
internet provider and your friend is on a different one. How does your data
really get from one network to the other? Some companies make private connections
with each other to exchange traffic but more and more traffic is flowing through
shared service platforms we call internet exchange points.
An internet exchange as a place where many different organizations come
together to interconnect their technology. There may be access providers,
broadcasters, publishers, social network sites, telecom operators. Really anybody
who relies on network traffic can benefit from the exchange. By connecting
in a common place, they save costs and the traffic between them
goes faster and much more efficiently.
Traditionally providers have sold each other passage on their networks but for
some providers who regularly exchange traffic, all that buying and selling get
to be more trouble than it's worth.
Many of them saw that if they just agreed to meet each other halfway, then
everybody's costs go down and the traffic moves more smoothly. Providers
are able to make a single connection to the platform to exchange traffic with
many participants. This way of doing things is called peering and it's making
the internet faster and more affordable for everybody.
The exchange participants make deals with each other according to mutual
benefit, so the peering system tends to regulate itself. It may seem like
companies are giving away their services but in fact each is providing their part
of the whole solution their customers need to most efficiently and reliably
exchange traffic. The internet is open,
decentralized,
and totally neutral.
Its intelligence lives at the edge, not in the core. No single organization
controls it and that's why it works as well as it does. By agreeing to
cooperate, we all make the internet happen. And that's how the internet happens.