What is the internet?
The internet is the wider network that allows computer networks around the world run by companies, governments, universities and other organizations to talk to one another. The result is a mass of cables, computers, data centers, routers, servers, repeaters, satellites and wifi towers that allows digital information to travel around the world.
It is that infrastructure that lets you order the weekly shop, share your life on Facebook, stream Outcast on Netflix, email your aunt in Wollongong and search the web for the world’s tiniest cat.
How big is the internet?
One measure is the amount of information that courses through it: about five exabytes a day. That’s equivalent to 40,000 two-hour standard definition movies per second.
It takes some wiring up. Hundreds of thousands of miles of cables criss-cross countries, and more are laid along sea floors to connect islands and continents. About 300 submarine cables, the deep-sea variant only as thick as a garden hose, underpin the modern internet. Most are bundles of hair-thin fibre optics that carry data at the speed of light.
The cables range from the 80-mile Dublin to Anglesey connection to the 12,000-mile Asia-America Gateway, which links California to Singapore, Hong Kong and other places in Asia. Major cables serve a staggering number of people. In 2008, damage to two marine cables near the Egyptian port of Alexandria affected tens of millions of internet users in Africa, India, Pakistan and the Middle East.
Last year, the chief of the British defence staff, Sir Stuart Peach, warned that Russia could pose a threat to international commerce and the internet if it chose to destroy marine cables
How much energy does the internet use?
The Chinese telecoms firm Huawei estimates that the information and communications technology (ICT) industry could use 20% of the world’s electricity and release more than 5% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025. The study’s author, Anders Andrae, said the coming “tsunami of data” was to blame.
In 2016, the US government’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that American data centres – facilities where computers store, process and share information – might need 73bn kWh of energy in 2020. That’s the output of 10 Hinkley Point B nuclear power stations.
What is the world wide web?
Google handles more than 40,000 searches per second, and has 60% of the global browser market through Chrome. There are nearly 2bn websites in existence but most are hardly visited. The top 0.1% of websites (roughly 5m) attract more than half of the world’s web traffic.
Among them are Google, YouTube, Facebook, the Chinese site Baidu, Instagram, Yahoo, Twitter, the Russian social network VK.com, Wikipedia, Amazon and a smattering of porn sites. The rise of apps means that for many people, being on the internet today is less about browsing the open web than getting more focused information: news, messages, weather forecasts, videos and the like.
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