Talking About Internet for Beginner (2)

Yesterday we talked about the connection of the internet and how we can sent email each other, and also we talked about the Wi-Fi. Today we continue the topic about internet for the beginner. So, How does a wave carry binary information?

We will talk about this in the other part if this contents. Ah, that is a very good question. So, the simplest thing you could do is every time you want to transmit, say, a zero, you could transmit one frequency. And every time you want to transmit a one, you transmit a different frequency. And then as long as the receiver can detect which frequency it is, it can know it's a one or zero. That's actually called frequency modulation. Is it also fair then to say that at its most basic, a cell phone is a radio?

It is a radio. It is absolutely a radio. Okay, so waves with binary information have to get from my phone to the router. But then at the router, they have to be turned into something else that can go out the back of that device along cables to get to their next location. Depending on what the wire is made of, it's either gonna be pulses of electricity if the wire is copper, or pulses of laser light. So, it's a laser and it just turns on when there's a one, it turns off when it's zero. Faster than this. A little bit faster than that. Faster than this?

So our photo went from binary to radio waves to little flashes of laser light, right? Yes. Where does it go after that? We're about to find out, but I'm gonna take Alex. You're not taking me? No. It's his turn. I gotta go. So, the wires out of the back of our router connect to other wires inside out office, which are owned by our internet service provider or ISP.

And they're responsible for looking at the header of each of those envelopes and figuring out the most efficient route to get to its next location, which is an internet hub. And where would that be? Right there. That's an internet hub. This old building? Yeah. All right, let's go. It looks just like every other office building I've ever seen.

Well, it started as Western Union's headquarters. So, it supported telegraph operators back in the day, and it's migrated to today where it's supporting the internet here in lower Manhattan. That's poetic. So all those wires all need to come to a place like this to connect between networks. So, for our example, our ISP in the office has a network. And AT&T, which Christophe's cell provider, has a network. And in order for my e-mail to get from my phone into Christophe's phone, all of those networks have to send those ones and zeros across those wire pathways. There's so much that happens in that split second that you connect.

So there's really no such thing as a cloud or any type of magnanimous. The cloud is a marketing term. The thing that I find really amazing is that, like, my e-mail is one of the millions of messages flowing through these cables. That feels really abstract, but it's actually there's a message to somebody's mom and there's a college application and there's a job offer. And there's a dank meme in here somewhere.

Okay, so my e-mail became a series of waves of light that travels over the tubes of the internet. But what if I wanted to send in somewhere really far away?

Somewhere on the other side of the world? We're in Newington, New Hampshire, to go to a factory that's gonna show us how internet works at long distances.  We're headed into the third layer,  the internet backbone. Oh, that's the cable highway.

What's the cable highway? We gonna talk about this topic tomorrow, and thank you very much for reading my article today.

See you next time.