StableHost – Blog

As a nerd, Internet routing comes up in every day conversations for us. For most people, paying a monthly fee to their Cable or DSL provider is the extent of how the Internet works, but how does something on your computer travel from one end of the country to the other in less then a second?

First off, you have to understand how it’s all connected together. The Internet isn’t a service that people sign up and you’re connected, it’s far more complex. The major Internet companies out there laid cables, known as fiber cables, it looks like this:

These cables are mostly under ground and we drive over them every day. The providers that own these cables are the main players of communication and are known as Level3, Sprint, QWest (CentryLink), AT&T, Savvis, etc. For the Internet to work, these cables need to connect each of these providers up with another provider. For example, AT&T has cables that connect into Sprint’s networking equipment all over the world. Companies then, such as us, buy a “port” on these major companies routers which allow us to connect into the “Internet”.

When you check your email, you send a packet to your Internet provider which has certain information such as where you want to go. Your ISP then check their database as to how they reach our network and send it on it’s way. It would be very expensive to buy ports on every ISP’s networking equipment so, so we rely on an Internet protocol called “BGP”. The BGP protocol will tell your ISP in order to get to us, you have to go to AT&T first, then Level3, and then Sprint and we have a port on Sprint’s networking equipment. In this example, it only changes locations 3 times, however in the real world, it’s normal for a single packet to change companies 10-15 times depending on how far away you are from where we are (and our servers).

It’s really incredible if you think about it, you are sending thousands and thousands packets to us every day. For example, when you check your email every 5 minutes, you send us atleast 20 packets just to ask us if you have any new email, so every 5 minutes, you are sending 20 packets from one end of the world to Phoenix faster then you can blink.

The Internet is an amazing thing, however since there’s so many moving pieces to the Internet and how it’s all connected together, there can be problems where you can’t reach your servers and it’s not our fault. For example, in our situation above where it went from your Internet company, to AT&T, and then Level3 to Sprint to us. If Level3 had an issue for whatever reason, your may not be able to reach your website.

We hope you enjoyed this, obviously there’s a lot more to the Internet as we describe here but that’s the basics on how things work.