Newbie Guides The Internet Guide What Makes Up The Internet

What Makes Up The Internet ?

What comprises the Internet is a difficult question; the answer changes over time. Five years ago the answer would have been easy: "All the networks, using the IP protocol, which cooperate to form a seamless network for their collective users." This would include various federal networks, a set of regional networks, campus networks, and some foreign networks.
More recently, some non-IP-based networks saw that the Internet was good. They wanted to provide its services to their clients. So they developed methods of connecting these "strange" networks (e.g., Bitnet, DECnets, etc.) to the Internet. At first these connections, called "gateways", merely served to transfer electronic mail (e-mail) between the two networks. Some, however, have grown to translate other services between the networks as well. Are they part of the Internet?
Maybe yes and maybe no. It depends on whether, in their hearts, they want to be. If this sounds strange, read on, it gets stranger.

The Internet has been an international network for a long time, but it only extended to the United States' allies and overseas military bases. Now, with the less paranoid world environment, the Internet is spreading everywhere. Eastern European countries longing for western scientific ties have wanted to participate for a long time, but were excluded by government regulation. This ban has been relaxed. Third world countries that formerly didn't have the means to participate now view the Internet as a way to raise their education and technology levels.

Here in Europe, the development of the Internet used to be hampered by national policies mandating OSI protocols. These policies prevented development of large scale Internet infrastructures except for the Scandinavian countries which embraced the Internet protocols long ago and are already well-connected. In 1989, RIPE (Reseaux IP Europeens) began coordinating the operation of the Internet in Europe and many of the hosts connected to the Internet are located in Europe.
The Internet's expansion is hampered by the lack of a good supporting infrastructure, namely a decent telephone system. In both Eastern Europe and the third world, a "state of the art" phone system is almost nonexistent. Even in major cities, connections are limited to the speeds available to the average home anywhere in the U.K., 56000 bits/second download and slower for uploading. Typically, even if one of these countries is "on the Internet," only a few sites are accessible. Usually, this is the major technical university for that country. However, as phone systems improve, you can expect this to change too; more and more, you'll see smaller sites (even individual home systems) connecting to the Internet.
Many big corporations have been on the Internet for years. For the most part, this has been limited to research and engineering departments. The same corporations used some other network (usually a private network) for their business communications. The IBM mainframes that handled their commercial data processing did the "real" networking using a protocol suite called System Network Architecture (SNA).

Businesses are now discovering that running multiple networks is expensive. Some are using the Internet for "one-stop" networking. They were scared away in the past by policies which excluded or restricted commercial use. Many of these policies are under review or have changed. As these restrictions drop, commercial use of the Internet has become progressively more common.
This should be especially good for small businesses. Motorola or Esso can afford to run nationwide networks connecting their sites, but Scotsmist can't. If we had an Edinburgh office, all it needs is an Internet connection on each end. For all practical purposes, we have a nationwide corporate network, just like the big boys.

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