How does the Internet Work? Part 1: Maps
How it works: 15-second answer
Internet is physical and fragile. The YouTube video file is stored on a computer in a building (aka data center) somewhere in the world, like Ashburn, Virginia. When you click the video on your phone to watch, the video travels from this computer in a building through a cable that is inches in diameter and miles long across oceans and continents, close to the speed of light in the form of 0s and 1s to your home router. This is how the internet works!
Figure 1: The data of my website chendurs.com, YouTube videos are stored on a computer in one of these buildings (aka data center) across the world.
There are four parts to the Internet.
Maps, which we’ll explore this week
Cables, data, and their speed - Part 2 of the Internet series
Data centers where information is stored - Part 3 of the Internet series
Internet network - Part 4 of the Internet series
What is an Internet map?
We have a world map that we’re familiar with. Likewise, the Internet has a map, yes! These Internet maps are designed by cartographers.
Each year, TeleGeography, a Washington D.C.-based market research firm, releases the map by asking telecommunications companies worldwide, like Verizon, AT&T, for the latest information about the capacity of their data lines and their busiest routes.
You can buy this official internet map gets delivered to your house for $250 a pop. And a big annual report known as Global Internet Geography, or GIG, is sold to the telecommunications industry for $5,495 a pop.
You can buy the official map here:
https://shop.telegeography.com/products/2022-global-internet-map-free-shipping
What is on the Map?
Figure 2: Map of the Internet depicting undersea cables connecting different countries and continents. The screenshot is not from the official map, which has more details than just undersea cables.
The lines on the map are the world's undersea communications cables - the physical connections between continents through which data travels in the form of 0s and 1s.
Note: The cables used for the internet to travel within the land are not depicted here in this map. More on that next week.The Internet's backbone architecture, the key links between cities.
Quantities of network traffic, boiling trillions of moving bits down to a series of thick and thin lines. The thicker the line, the more data flows through it.
View the map here by zooming in/zooming out:
What are the lines on the Map?
Each line drawn on the map represented a single cable, inches in diameter but thousands of miles in length. It looked huge on the map, but it would be the size of a garden hose on the ocean floor. Your YouTube video, blog post, and other information travel through this cable as 1s and 0s across the world to someone’s desktop at the speed of light.
A country can lose access to 99% of the internet if one manages to cut all the cables connecting it. One of the countries here has fewer than 10 cables connecting it to other countries!
The more I read about the Internet, the more fragile it seems to be.
Figure 3: A diver working on an undersea cable through which (internet) data flows in the form of 0s and 1s, close to the speed of light.
What are the thick and thin lines on the map?
The most heavily trafficked routes between cities on the map, such as between New York and London, are depicted with the thickest lines - not because there were necessarily more cables there (or some single, super thick cable) but because that was the route across which the most data flowed.
Why are all the connection points of the undersea cables on the map in Coastal shores?
You must have noticed something weird in Figure 2. All the connection points of undersea cables are on the shore. Why?
The Internet's structure is based upon connectivity between world cities close to coastal shores like Silicon Valley, New York, Washington, DC, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Tokyo, and Seoul.
This makes sense, and here is why.
Let’s say we have an Engineering Explained YouTube channel’s video stored in a data center in Thailand. Now, everyone in the world wants to watch it. So the data of this video should travel across the world through continents and oceans. Where is the best place to connect these cables across countries and continents?
We need coastal shores for this purpose. This way, we have the shortest cables to lay between countries. So it's easier to manage, set up, and also cheaper. This map shows the undersea cables only. Within the land, companies like AT&T and others handle the infrastructure to relay the information through their network. Finally, you get it to your home router. So everything is connected.
I know there are many unanswered questions. We’ll look at how cables are laid out, how information travels, the speed, what’s inside the cable, who owns these, who pays whom, and all the other exciting information about cables in the next edition. That’s all, thanks for reading!
