We are all so familiar with the Internet. A large portion of the world’s economy to people’s entertainment and various other aspects lie in the Internet. Without the Internet we could have experience the feelings similar to global power outage. To save us from such disabling day knowing how the bits and pieces work together we can save the day for Internet outage and other breakage. Also, if you are able to communicate with network technician in terms of the networking, this may solve the issue way faster than not having to know any of the tech terms and concept.
Internet Tiers
Yes, this is the very first tech term and it exist. You know how Internet is, millions or billions of computer connecting together, forms this massive network on the Earth. Yet how are these computer organized though? Well, to keep everything up and running, Internet is has tier level, called tiers. The top and primary tier Tier 1 is comprised of small amount of companies called Tier 1 providers. The tier 1 providers own the road of long-distance, high-speed fiber optic networks called backbones. These backbones spread across the major cities of the earth, although not all of the tier 1 go through all the cities, and they all interconnect at a special location called Network Access Points (NAPs). Anybody wiling to connect to one of these tier 1 providers should have a thick wallet. Tier 1 providers do not charge each other to connect.
Now, there is tier 2 providers. These are smaller, region basis networks and pays the tier 1 providers. All or majority of the public Internet providers are tier 2 providers. There are tier 3 providers, who are sub level of tier 3 providers and connects to tier 2 providers.
Backbone router
The equipment that is used to interwoven all of these together is called the backbone router. Number of backbone routers connecting to each other forms the Internet and make it all successfully communicate with each other and work altogether as a whole. If you could picture this web of network, it would look like bunch of lines overlapping and connecting to each other in a decentralized nature.
One of the major reason for interweaving backbone router is if one goes down another work as an alternate pathways. This is incredibly thoughtful! When an user sends a message to the other user, the shortest possible route is taken to deliver the message. Still, in any case, something happened to the shortest route and the message is not sent. The client device would try to resend the message again, in the mean time, the router would find another shortest possible route to send the message. When the route is found, connection is established and the message is sent. With such implementation, Internet can not really go down altogether unless a biblical scale of catastrophe took place.