How does the Internet Work? Networks and addresses explained.

if you're watching this video then it's safe to assume that you know what the internet is to at least some degree it's the place where YouTube Facebook Wikipedia and all of your emails are sitting but have you ever wondered how the internet does what it does if you have then this video is just for you a common problem many people have is thinking of the internet like this as if it's this one thing that all of our computers connect to things are either on the internet or on a computer in reality the internet looks like this just a bunch of computers sending and receiving data from each other using the phone lines the internet itself is really more of a concept than an actual thing a website YouTube video or Facebook page doesn't exist on the internet they exist on a computer somewhere in the world that is being accessed through the internet as a refresher from my video on binary everything in your computer that makes a data is composed of a sequence of high and low voltage charges that are interpreted as binary numbers very early on in the existence of computers programmers were able to send this data from one computer to another in the same room over a wire directly connecting the two this type of connection is known as a local area network or a LAN you have data on one computer you connect a wire from that computer to another and the sequence of electrical pulses are sent across that wire and then stored on the second computer now it wasn't long after this that computer scientists came up with the idea of sending these same signals over the telephone lines to be able to theoretically send and receive data from any computer anywhere in the world provided of course it was connected to the same phone lines this concept went through many iterations and names but became known as the Internet around 1995 when it was made available for public use the fundamental physical workings of the internet haven't really changed much from this model of computers just talking to each other over wires the specifics have been updated and optimized but the concept has remained the same so with the internet being this simple what our websites servers ISPs I in MAC addresses or the cloud well let's start with a website like YouTube as I said earlier your YouTube channel the commons videos and likes they don't exist on the internet they exist on a computer somewhere that's connected to the Internet these computers that host data that compose a website are known as servers and these computers are made in a very specific way to be able to store lots and lots of data and to be able to send and receive it very quickly take for example the video that you're watching right now I made this video on my computer and then I uploaded it to YouTube when I uploaded it to YouTube the data composing this video was sent to a server somewhere that's owned by Google and then when you clicked on this video your computer sent a request across the internet to the computer where this video was stored which then sent the data composing this video back across the Internet to your computer where it's stored in your RAM sticks and possibly in temporary files on your hard drive once in your RAM the other parts of your computer use that data to create the video and audio on your screens this process of temporarily storing the video data in your RAM sticks is known as streaming now let's move on to what an ISP is also known as Internet service provider I like to use the analogy of roads here you have interstate highways and then you have two lane highways that are smaller and connect to the interstate highways and then from those you have even smaller roads that go to businesses and even smaller ones that connect to your neighborhood in your driveway the wires that make up the Internet work very much the same way there are companies that own and manage the wires and sometimes satellites and other infrastructure that transfer your data the massive distances hundreds and thousands of miles these are known as Tier one networks and they're like the interstate highways of the internet it's not really practical for these companies to manage all of the smaller lines within your town that transfer the data directly to your house in the same way that the people who build the highways aren't the same who are going to build the road to your neighborhood this is where Internet service providers come in Internet service providers are Nona is either tier 2 or tier 3 networks depending on how specific they are a tier 2 network contains the power lines that connect from the massive intercontinental ones to the smaller data centers that serve entire towns a tier 3 provider has cables that run from those data centers to the various houses and businesses in that town each tier essentially buys data from the tier above it and sells it to the tier below them this allows the tier 1 networks to focus on the management of very large-scale data transfer and the tier 2 and 3 networks to focus on the smaller scale ones another way of thinking of this is in terms of government the federal government manages everything in the country and allocates resources to state governments so that they can handle more local issues state governments have town governments beneath them and the town governments serve the businesses and residents of that town directly so that wraps up Internet service providers and this leads perfectly into IP addresses and MAC addresses we've covered how data gets to your doorstep but what happens from there the coaxial outlet in your wall is the end of the cable that connects to the greater network we just talked about the next step is the modem and then the router while these are technically two separate entities it's becoming more and more common for the two to be combined into a single device known as a gateway for the sake of keeping things simple I'm going to refer to these as a gateway the Gateway plugs into that coaxial outlet in the wall and it contains several Ethernet ports and provides a Wi-Fi signal your computers phones and tablets can connect to the Gateway with Ethernet cables or by connecting to the Wi-Fi a MAC address is the way the internet recognizes the address of your individual device while an IP address is essentially the address for the Gateway or rather for the coaxial outlet it's plugged into an IP address can change depending on which modem you have which coaxial outlet it's plugged into and depending on how your service provider likes to do things but in summary an IP address is basically the Internet address for your place of residence if you took your phone over to your friend's house and connect it to their Wi-Fi you would now be using their IP address but your phone would still have the same MAC address that it did at your house so to review let's take a look at what happened to get this video to play through your monitor and speakers when I finished making this video I told it to upload to YouTube the sequence of electrical charges that compose my video were sent from my computer's hard drive through my Ethernet cable to get to my gateway then from my gateway they traveled through the coaxial cable and onto the tier 3 network in my town which led them to a tier 3 data center and from there they traveled on the tier 2 network to a tier 2 data center from there they traveled along the tier 1 Network massive distances to a separate tier 2 data center closer to Google's server farm most likely in Lenoir North Carolina it then traveled on that tier 2 Network then to a tier 3 Network and then to the building where YouTube servers are located then it travels on to a server where it's stored on a hard drive just like the one that started on in my apartment when you clicked on this video your computer's sent a request along that same path I just described landed at the server and then the server sent the electric charges composing my video back along the network and enter your computer's Ram where it could be played from the last thing to talk about is this term known as the cloud all this really refers to is a system where your data and sometimes even your computer processes are run not on your device but on a server somewhere every time you save data to your device a backup of that same data is sent to a server somewhere dedicated to your name this means even if you lose your phone or your drive dies you can retrieve all of your data from that server it's called a cloud because it's essentially meant to provide the illusion that there is this cloud in the sky above your head with all your data when really as I just explained the cloud itself isn't where your data is stored it's just how your data gets to you that is to say through Wi-Fi signals or cell phone signals I really don't care for this term because I consider it misleading and somewhat unhelpful it's another example of something that's really not all that new it's just that it's gotten a lot more efficient and faster because technology has improved the same exact concept used to be called hosting the things that have changed are just the specifics how much you can store how frequently you can store how much all of that costs and how reliable it is to access that data all this has really just changed as technology has improved but the concept is almost as old as the Internet itself is so I think I'm going to conclude this video here there are a lot of other things that could go into such as web browsers search engines or even the dark web and if you have any interest in seeing videos on those topics liking commenting and subscribing are quick and simple ways to let me know that this video is of interest I would also like to give a huge thanks to everyone of you who has subscribed I recently hit 25,000 subscribers which is far more than I ever expected this channel to reach especially only in a single year I look forward to making more and more content for this channel and seeing where it goes from here so have a great day guys and I'll see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: Basics Explained, H3Vtux

Views: 161,968

Keywords: Internet, Computers, Binary, Educational, Cloud, TCP, IP, Compsci, IP Address, LAN, The Cloud, What is the Cloud, What is an IP Address, What is a MAC Address, What is an ISP, Internet Service Provider, How does the internet work, what is the internet?, Computer Science, What is an internet service provider?, Local Area Network, What is a gateway?, What is the internet?, Where is the internet?, Learning

Id: 82m2du-zgmY

Length: 10min 5sec (605 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 17 2019