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How does the internet work?

My dear beloved to who I write… 💌 Before even discussing computer networks, I think it is important to say that at the heart of computer networking lies a problem that humans have been working on to solve for thousands of years1: optimizing communication with each other, sometimes across long distances.

How Do We Communicate? In the previous section we detailed how a computer network can be looked at from the topological perspective, analyzing all the different components and how they connect together.

Why Does My Internet Suck? The most common shared experience of users of the internet is when the network is moving slowly, and you get the urge to throw your device out a window1.

But I’m Not A Gamer? In the previous section we discussed all about how we can measure different forms of delay that determine our network round trip time, and ping speed.

Who Are You 🎵? Imagine that Host $A$ and Host $B$ are in the same room and want to communicate with each other, and lets assume for now that communication is totally possible across some medium (like Wi-Fi) without any problems.

How Do We Actually Send Messages to People? In our previous page, we said in a hand-wavy way that we “send” messages to people via their MAC address. But how do we actually send these messages to people?

What if Nobody is in Control? In our previous example of switched networks, there were hidden switch devices that were responsible for the forwarding of communication between various devices, and in this way the network works wonderfulling like magic.

Error Detection and Error Correction With all the discussion on the previous page, there is a follow up question of how a receiver of a message might realize that something has gone wrong, and thus act accordingly.