The internet's technical architecture and access methods

¶ … Internet

Begun originally as a research project for quickly sharing information across vast geographic distances between universities, the Internet today has grown into a global network where the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is used both for the publishing and reading of information online. The TCP/IP networking protocol forms the foundation of the Internet and is organized using the Open Systems Interconnect Model (Schuler 2005). The Internet is actually comprised of literally millions of Web servers which store and publish websites and other forms of information. The rapid growth of laptop computers with wireless concepts, convergence devices including PDAs and even cellular phones can access the Internet through the wireless protocols now commonplace. The Internet is not a network that is owned by anyone, it is actually a collection of networks that are jointly supported through a variety of approaches. These include telecommunications companies who sell specific services for gaining access to the Internet including dial-up, Digital Signal Line (DSL), Asynchronous Digital Signal Line (ADSL) or broadband access.

In the majority of homes globally, dial-up telephone connection is by far the most commonly used approach to gaining access to the Internet. There are more and more free providers in this area, offering their services in exchange for having subscribers view advertisements. The majority of services however are fee-based where the subscribers contract with Internet Service Provider (ISP)'s dial-up modems. The ISP then acts as the intermediary to allow access to the Internet.