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This week, IS 6100 students shoud take a good long look at chapter 6 on telecommunications.

Chapters 3 (hardware) and 4 (software) are helpful, especially for students who are working on the Shavlik case.

There’s a good discussion of the Internet in chapter 6, but sometimes, it’s easier to compare the Internet to a bunch of pipes. Instead of ware, we push data through our Internet pipes, in the form of packets. Think of a packet as a drop of water.

The TCP/IP protocol suite helps computers put data into these pipes, and then reassemble the data at the other end.

Think about the plumbing in your home. Do you really know what happens to the water on its way into your faucet? Or what happens to the water from your shower or tub as it leaves your bathroom?

If you’re like most people, you probably don’t know and you’re glad. With the Internet, it is helpful to know that at some point, your data packets are moving through one or more Internet pipes called the backbone. These connections run at a very high rate of speed that can support thousands of sessions at the same time. There’s a good discussion of how data moves throught eh physical portions of the Internet at http://navigators.com/sessphys.html

A router is a device that directs pakets on a network. There are millions of routers on the Internet. If you have a WiFi or wireless router in your home, you’re using a smaller version of the routers and switches used at your ISP and on the INternet backbone.

At the bottom of the diagram on the page linked above, there’s the message “Information Flows over MANY Paths”. One important feature of the Internet is that the packets in your session can be rerouted if a backbone connection is not available.