Have you ever wondered about the complexity of the Internet?

So, what is the internet? We use it all the time, we practically can't live without it, but how many of us actually "know" how it works?

The best way to describe this mysterious beast is to see at as a network of networks, none more superior than the other, but all interconnected, like a web, no pun intended. This is the beauty of it, and this is what makes any little guy out there powerful. Everyone can access it and everyone can voice their opinion.

Being a techie, here is a visualization or a simple schematic of one little "subnet" within the "net".

This schematic could represent your home situation or office. Say if you have two computers at home and you use cable to connect to the internet. Well, then you have two computers in your so called "subnet", your two machines can communicate directly to each other using a so called "broadcast address". However, if one of your machines would like to communicate to your friend next door or another "subnet" then you have to go through the "router", which is able to send messages to someone outside of your own "subnet. So the takeaway is this, when you communicate within the subnetwork you use a "broadcast address" and the two machines could see each others machine's IP addresses and MAC or physical address; however, when you are communicating with someone outside your subnet, all their machine sees is your router IP address and same for you - your machine only sees their router's IP address. So if you'd like to know what your router's IP address, you can do that by going to www.whatismyip.com to find out.

Here we've been talking about a common home cable connection, or say dial-up, DSL, and the likes where you use a modem. However, the structure doesn't change when you look at a big corporation with their own network - it is just the same, a network of networks where routers are just dedicated Sisco routers or it could just be a computer that you modify to work as a router. The scale is larger, but the communication mechanism stays the same. When you are at home, your router is owned by your Internet Service Provider (ISP), when you're in a big corporate office, your router is owned by your corporation's own network. It has two main functions send and receive packets of information and serve as a firewall to protect your computers connected to it. It is critical to realize how simple this is even though it may initially seem very confusing.

So we mentioned a machine IP address, MAC or physical address, and the router IP address. So you'd think there will be no difference between these, but there is! And we'll talk about that tomorrow.