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Part Three

The Internet Network

We’ve tracked your data’s journey from your home, across MCSnet’s local network, and now it’s reached the “on-ramp” to the global internet in Edmonton. This is where your data leaves MCSnet’s specific roads and merges onto the much larger, interconnected system that makes up the internet.

The Internet’s Vast Network: A Global System of Interchanges

Imagine the internet not as a single road, but as an incredibly vast, intricate highway system connecting every city and town on Earth. Once your data leaves MCSnet’s network, it’s essentially a vehicle looking for the most efficient route to its destination, whether that’s a website in Toronto, a game server in Texas, or a streaming service in London.

How Routes Are Chosen: Your data isn’t just randomly bouncing around. Specialized network devices called routers act like sophisticated GPS systems. They constantly analyze traffic conditions and available paths, striving to send your data packets along the shortest and fastest route to their final destination. However, “shortest” doesn’t always mean physically shortest; it means the path with the least congestion and fastest transfer speeds at that moment.

The “Speed Limit” of the Route: Even after your data leaves MCSnet, the overall speed you experience still depends heavily on the “responsiveness” of the route it takes. This responsiveness is influenced by:

  • Distance: The further the data has to travel, the more “hops” it generally makes between different network segments.
  • Congestion: Just like roads, internet routes can get busy. If a particular path is heavily used, your data might slow down, or routers might choose a slightly longer, less congested path.
  • Infrastructure Quality: Some parts of the internet highway are newer, wider, and better maintained (fiber optic cables), while others might be older or less robust.

Major Services: The Internet’s Dedicated Express Lanes

When you connect to major services like Google (which owns YouTube) or Microsoft, your data often gets to travel on the internet’s equivalent of dedicated express lanes or even private superhighways. These massive companies have invested enormous resources in:

  • Direct Interconnections: They’ve established direct, high-capacity connections with many ISPs and other major networks around the world. This means your data doesn’t have to bounce through as many intermediate networks.
  • Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) / Caching: For services like YouTube, Google uses CDNs with servers placed strategically closer to users. So, when you open a YouTube video here in Saint Paul, it might very well “hit a cache” (a temporary storage copy) in a nearby city like St. Paul, Alberta, or travel across a large fiber optic cable almost directly to a major Google data center in Seattle. This significantly reduces travel time and improves loading speeds.

Smaller Destinations: The Scenic Routes with More Potential for Delays

Conversely, if you’re trying to reach a smaller website hosted in, say, the United Kingdom, your data’s journey becomes more complex. It might:
 
  1. Cross Multiple Networks in North America: Your data will likely pass through several different North American internet backbones (owned by different large ISPs).
  2. Traverse Undersea Cables: A significant portion of the journey will involve traveling thousands of kilometers through fiber optic cables laid on the ocean floor.
  3. Navigate Local Networks Abroad: Once it reaches the UK, it will then travel through that country’s local internet providers’ networks to reach the specific server.

 

This longer, more circuitous route means more opportunities for latency (delays due to distance and processing at each “hop”), potentially limited bandwidth if any segment of the path is less robust, and a higher susceptibility to peak time issues (like slow traffic during rush hour) because it’s sharing more general infrastructure.

Inevitable Bumps: Even the Best Routes 
Face Challenges

Even the most robust internet paths aren’t entirely immune to problems.

  • Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks: These are malicious attempts to overload a network or server with an excessive amount of traffic, effectively creating a massive digital traffic jam to block legitimate users.
  • Seasonal Congestion: We’ve all seen examples during busy holiday periods when services like PlayStation and Xbox experience downtime. This is often due to an unprecedented surge in legitimate user traffic overwhelming their servers and network capacity, even for companies that plan for high demand.


So, while MCSnet gets your data efficiently to the edge of the global internet in Edmonton, the subsequent journey is a dynamic process of finding the best path across a vast, shared network, where distance, congestion, and even malicious attacks can all play a role in your experience.