Hey there, welcome back.
All right, if you thought so far everything's been really, really cool, things aren't going to get
a lot cooler.
We're going to be talking about the Internet backbone.
So we recognize this because I've been talking about it for the last couple of lessons.
But some of you may have had a question.
That is, what do the arrows mean?
I mean, it's kind of like magic, right?
I just told you that we send off the IP address to the servers.
The server responds with some files.
But this is just magic.
Like, what are these arrows mean?
So we're going to talk about that in this lesson.
And we're going to do that with this really, really fuzzy diagram that I found online from this website.
It's not the clearest picture, but it actually has some really important things.
So I want to use that to demonstrate to you what the Internet backbone is.
So some of you know, the way we connect in our homes at a coffee shop or at work is we usually have
Wi-Fi or, you know, maybe sometimes we still have people that are using Ethernet cables and connecting
through those.
But for now, let's just focus on the fact that we have a home and we have Wi-Fi.
And this Wi-Fi essentially gives us Internet from the router.
You can see this little person over here working hard with the router next to him and this router is
connected.
All the way to something called a modem, and this is something that if you ever sign up for Internet
or change providers, you most likely had somebody come to your house and install something.
And that's this box over here that essentially allows the ISP, the Internet service provider, this
big building over here.
We remember that to connect to it.
So this modem has the signal towers that transmit signals of Google dotcom and it receives these messages.
And then this is why I picked this image, just because I think it's incredible.
You see this wire that is connected all the way to the ISP and then the Internet service provider,
the ISP is connected to this magical blue cable that is the Internet backbone.
And something that's really important in this image is the fact that there is Wi-Fi, which is over
the air.
But at the end of the day, everything is kind of connected through cables.
So some of you or many of you are all of you might be wondering what the hell is this Internet backbone
thing?
Sounds cool, but this this kind of so I found a really, really cool thing that we can do together.
I'll post this website in the notes after this lesson.
But if you go over here, you actually see the Internet backbone.
So let's say we're in Brazil and we wanted to search Google dotcom.
Well, from Brazil, from our home through Wi-Fi.
It connects to our router, to our modem, and then all the way to our Internet service provider, lets
say its Internet service providers over here and then through cables.
It connects all the way to, let's say, this point over here.
And let's say for now that the Google servers are located somewhere in Portugal over here.
Well, that signal of me looking for that IP address of Google and looking for those Google files is
going to go through this submarine cable.
Yeah, you heard that right.
It's a physical cable that goes at the bottom of the sea floor from Brazil all the way to Portugal where
the Google servers are.
And then the Google service says, yep, I got those files here.
There are and sends it all the way back.
Through the ISP all the way back to our house.
Isn't that cool that there's physical cables that are connecting and creating this Internet?
So, you know, there are times where somebody destroys or something happens where these cable connections
are cut off and you sometimes lose Internet connection that way.
But, yeah, the Internet backbone is literally just this network all over the world of connected cables
so that we can transfer these files all over the world.
And just to show you how insane this is, somebody from the Opti project over here, I got this off
of Wikipedia mapped out and I believe this was in 2015, just 30 percent of the network.
And you can see over here that each one of these dots is an IP address.
So computer that is connected to another computer that is connected to another computer and that's the
Internet.
The Internet is just all these connected computers that are just transferring files between each other
and as web developers.
And this is the coolest thing.
And that's why I just think everybody should be a web developer, because it's so cool you're allowing
this to happen.
You're allowing this transferring of files from one computer to another, transferring knowledge from
Brazil to Portugal and all over the world.
And you get to be part of it.
You get to be part of this network and you get to evolve.
When this picture of the Internet came to me, I knew that this was the career for me.
So hopefully that gets you excited.
In the next section, I'm going to show you something really cool, Traceroute, before we finish up
the lesson and we get into the next sections.
So I hope that was cool seeing the next one.
Bye bye.