By Theo Damaskos

We are all used to searching up questions on Google or using Teams for homework on multiple different devices, but what really happens between when you click and when you get a response?

How the Internet travels:

Many people may think that the Internet is in ‘the air’, and whilst this may be true for the last tiny stretch of your internet connection (your computer to your router, or your phone to your cell tower), the majority of your data travels through a web of fibre optic cables, which works by pulsing light through a cable thousands of times a second to represent data (1 for a pulse of light or 0 for no pulse of light), which is then received and reconstructed on the other end of the cable. In this way, data can travel at practically the speed of light (eg. ~10ms from Guildford to London or ~80ms from Guildford to New York), making data retrieval feel instant and also allow for us to interact with people online in real time.

                Internet searching

First of all, after you click on a website, your device sends data over WiFi (a type of communication over radio waves) to your router, which in turn forwards this data through a series of cables until it reaches the target destination, such as your closest Google server location in London. This server will then compute your request with algorithms against its database and send the data back in tiny packets that your device puts together and displays to you as a website, for example.

                The Cloud

Moreover, I’m sure you’ve heard of ‘the cloud’, but the truth is that most people don’t know how it really works. How does your phone have the same Microsoft Teams as your surface? The cloud is crucial to the Internet we know so well today, and our devices constantly talk back and forth with it, with all our data being stored under accounts with different companies, such as Microsoft for our school accounts. After you log in and the server identifies your account, it can relay all information you request from the central database (the cloud) back to your device and can also save any information you change back to the cloud, therefore allowing your data to be synchronised across all devices you are logged in on.

In short, the internet is not just as simple as you may have thought but is rather a combination of technologies and physical cables that allow all the magic to happen.