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The Internet | Wires, Cables, and Wi-FiMy name is Tess Winlock, I'm a software

engineerat Google. Here's a question: How does a picture, text message, or email
get sent from one deviceto another? It isn't magic, it's the Internet. A tangible,
physical system made to move information.The Internet is a lot like the postal
service, but the physical stuff that gets sent is alittle bit different. Instead of
boxes and envelopes, the Internet ships binary information.Information is made
of bits. A bit can be described as any pair of opposites: on oroff, yes or no. We
typically use a 1 meaning on, or a 0 meaning off. Because a bit has twopossible
states we call it binary code. 8 bits strung together makes 1 byte. 1000 bytesall
together is a kilobyte. 1000 kilobytes is a megabyte. A song is typically
encodedusing about 3-4MB. It doesn't matter if it's a picture, a video, or a song,
everythingon the Internet is represented and sent around as bits. These are the
atoms of information.But it's not like we're physically sending 1s and 0s from one
place to another or oneperson to another. So what is the physical stuff that
actually gets sent over the wiresand the airways? Well, let's look at a small
example here of how humans can physicallycommunicate to send a single bit of
information from one place to another. Let's say thatwe can turn on a light for a
1 or off for 0. Or use beeps or similar sorts of thingsto Morse code. These
methods work but they're really slow, error prone, and totally dependentupon
humans. What we really need is a machine. Throughout history, we've built
many systemsthat can actually send this binary information through different
types of physical mediums.Today, we physically send bits by electricity, light, and
radio waves. To send a bit via electricity,imagine that you have two lightbulbs
connected by a copper wire. If one device operator turnson the electricity then
the lightbulb lights up. No electricity, then no light. If theoperators on both ends
agree that light on means 1 and light off means 0, then we havea system for
sending bits of information from one person to another using electricity. Butwe
have kinda a small problem, if you need to send a 0 five times in a row, well
howcan you do that in such a way that either person can actually count the
number of 0s?Well the solution is to introduce a clock or a timer. The operators
can agree that thesender will send 1 bit per second and the receiver will sit down
and record every singlesecond and see what's on the line. To send five 0s in a
row, you just turn off the light,wait 5 seconds, the person at the other end of the
line will write down all 5 seconds.For five 1s in a row, switch it on, wait 5 seconds,
write down every second. Obviously we'd liketo send things a little bit faster than
one bit per second, so we need to increase ourbandwidth - the maximum
transmission capacity of a device. Bandwidth is measured by bitrate,which is the
number of bits that we can actually send over a given period of time usually
measuredin seconds. A different measure of speed is the latency, or the amount
of time it takesfor one bit to travel from one place to another, from the source
to the requesting device.In our human analogy, one bit per second was pretty
fast but kinda hard for a human tokeep up with. Let's say that you actually want
to download a 3MB song in 3 seconds,at 8 million bits per megabyte that means
a bit rate of about 8 million bits per second.Obviously, humans can't send or
receive 8 million bits per second but a machine coulddo that just fine. But now
there's also the question of what sort of cable to send thesemessages over and
how far the signals can go. With an ethernet wire, the kind that youfind in your
home, office, or school you see measurable signal loss or interference overjust a
few hundred feet. For the Internet to work all around the world, we need to
havean alternative method to send bits really long distances. We're talking like
acrossoceans. So what else can we use? What do we know that moves a lot faster
than just electricitythrough a wire? Light. We can actually send bits as light
beams from one place to anotherusing a fiber optic cable. A fiber optic cable is a
thread of glass engineered to reflectlight. When you send a beam of light down
the cable, light bounces up and down the lengthof the cable until it is received
on the other end. Depending on the bounce angle, we canactually send multiple
bits simultaneously, all of them traveling at the speed of light.So fiber is really
really fast. But more importantly the signal doesn't really degrade over
longdistances. This is how you can go hundreds of miles without signal loss. This
is whywe use fiber optic cables across the ocean floors to connect one continent
to another.In 2008 there was a cable that was actually cut near Alexandria, Egypt
which really interruptedthe Internet for most of the Middle East and India. So
we take this Internet thing forgranted but it's really a pretty fragile, physical
system. And fiber is awesome butit's also really expensive and hard to work with.
For most purposes, you're going to findcopper cable. But how do we move things
without wires? How do we send things wirelessly? Radio.Wireless bit sending
machines typically use a radio signal to send bits from one placeto another. The
machines have to actually translate the 1s and 0s into radio waves ofdifferent
frequencies. The receiving machines reverse the process and convert it back
intobinary on your computer. So wireless has made our Internet mobile. But a
radio signal doesn't travel all that far before it gets completely garbled. This way
you can't really pick up a Los Angeles radio station in Chicago. As great as wireless
is, today it still relies on the wired Internet. If you're in a coffee shop using wifi,
then the bits get sent to this wireless router and then are transferred through
the physical wire to travel the really long distances of the Internet. The physical
method for sending bits may change in thefuture, whether its lasers sent
between satellites, or radio waves from balloons, or drones, butthe underlying
binary representation of information and the protocols for sending that
informationand receiving that information have pretty much stayed the same.
Everything on the Internet,whether it's words, emails, images, cat videos, puppy
videos, all come down to these 1s and0s being delivered by electronic pulses,
light beams, radio waves, and lots and lots of love.

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