Web Dev Essentials #1: The Basic Structure of the Internet

4 min readJan 2, 2024

If you’re someone who’s embarking on the journey of web development, understanding the fundamental workings of the internet is your crucial first step. A solid grasp of the internet, its core components, data flows and its protocols is essential to lay the foundation for building a strong knowledge base as a Web Developer. Here, we will explore the structure of the internet in a simple way.

Introduction

You probably already know what the internet is. It is a vast complex network of interconnected devices and computers. The internet is not just a tool but the very backbone of the online world. This may be hard to imagine, but there are around 5.3 billion internet users in the world as of 2023. But how does all of this work? How is such vast amounts of data transferred between devices? Let’s dive into the article and find out how this works.

How does the Internet work?

At it’s very basic level, we can imagine the internet as a connection between two devices, so that they can transfer data to each other. These two devices may be connected with wires, or wirelessly, through a special spectrum of light waves called radiowaves (thanks uncle Marconi).

Now you can connect one device to the other easily with a wire or wirelessly, maybe you can connect three devices to each other in a triangle, but what happens when you increase the number of devices in a network?

Interconnected mess(h) of devices — Interconnected Mess(h) of devices

Pain. You can see this quickly becomes a painful mess. Even with wireless this type of network isn’t all that scalable, and when you consider that we want to connected say most of the devices in the world to form a huge network, this simply ain’t gonna cut buddy!

Router

Here’s where a router is used.

A Router is a device that connects multiple devices in a network with each other and also outside of it

Network of devices with a Router in between

A Router is basically like a traffic policeman and a mailman combined. It accepts data from one device and sends it to a destination device connected to it, and it does this concurrently, multiple data units at a time. This is called routing. This simplifies the architecture of the network, by delegating the job of routing to the Router.

Now, we can easily scale our local network to connect to other networks as well. All you got to do is connect this router to another router of another network.

And Boom! We have ourselves a small Local Area Network or LAN. Now we can keep adding new networks like this, but what if we want to connect to a network over huge distances? And who’s going to regulate and maintain (and charge) all of this infrastructure? This is where ISPs enter the picture.

Internet Service Providers

An Internet Service Provider, ISP for short, is a company that provides you the infrastructure and the services to connect to the internet. When connecting over large distances, simply attaching routers to each other is not possible. The huge amount of data going from continent to continent needs to be transferred via Industry grade satellites or undersea fiber optic cables. The ISPs are the ones who provide and maintain this infrastructure, and the ones you generally pay to recharge your data plans to.

So the overall structure of the internet looks something like this:

A simple representation of the internet — A Simple Representation of the Internet

Conclusion

Why is understanding the structure of the internet crucial to Web development? That’s because it lays the foundation to understanding the more advanced stuff like protocols, OSI and TCP/IP models which are the building blocks upon which web apps and websites are structured. It also helps us visually imagine the process that happens when we interact with a web application.

Reference

For a deep dive, you can read this paper here

Here we very roughly explored how the internet is structured.

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Although there are many elements to how the internet truly works, we will cover those in the upcoming articles until we reach the God tier in the realm of Web Dev.

Until then, Ciao!