Data transfer appeared when basic telephony started to grow and the need for more means of information transfer started growing.

At first, the only means of communication was the telegraph, but when Graham Bell patented the telephone, voice became the standard of communication. Originally, the Bell Company only handled local communication services, but later AT&T was created to manage long distance calls.

This way, telephone services were divided into local and long distance. Local calls are routed to the telephone company’s central office which then connects to the long distance network to transfer calls. On the other end, the call is in turn sent to the central office of the telephone company of the person we are calling, which then establishes the link for what is called the last mile.

Technology advances helped fuel the telephony industry and it eventually expanded to allow not only voice transfer, but also data. The appearance of the internet helped to boost data transfer technology to allow what we now know as high speed internet connections.

Basically, data transfer over the internet in similar to telephony. At one end, we have a person sitting in front of a computer that, for example, wants to access a website from his or her browser. When the address is typed into the browser, the computer sends a request through the modem, from there to a router out to the ISP and the ISP then routes the data through a network of routers all over the world to eventually reach the server that hosts the site and back again.

Of course, your ISP does not have you as an only customer, they usually have hundreds or thousands of persons using the service at the same time.

We can compare the ISP to a gate or portal through which all the information to and from its customers is routed. Also, it is important to note that data transfer over the internet occurs in packets. For example, let’s say that there are 10 persons using an internet connection of a particular ISP at the same moment. What happens is that all 10 persons are sending requests and receiving information at the same time. What routers and other equipment do is to divide all this information into packets.

If you are sending a file over the net, it will be split up into packets and samples of packets from each user are lined up and sent at a time. So, the first part of your file is tagged and put in a queue, the first part of user number two’s file is tagged and put in the queue after user number one’s portion, and so on. When there are enough “portions” of each file to form a packet, it is sent over the network to the first router. This router will “read” the tags and determine where it must send each packet and route it to the next router.

When the packet arrives at the other end, it is again split up into the original portions and delivered to its destination.

Over public internet connections, data is only tagged in order to determine its destination and other basic information. However, over private internet connections, such as a Point to Point connection or Frame Relay service, tags are formatted into the header of the packet and have other valuable information, such as monitoring and error checking. If a router along the way finds an error in the packet, depending on the type of information, it can even drop the packet and send a request for the packet to be sent again.

The name of “information highway” is very appropriate for the internet, as it is exactly the way it is constructed through a vast interconnection of local streets (local ISP) that connect to highways (long distance IP connections) through onramps and offramps (routers) that allow us to get on and off these highways. And, of course, just like a highway, speed will be determined by the power of our car and the amount of traffic at the moment we are on it.

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