What is The Internet?

The internet is a giant network of computers all around the world that are connected together and can talk to each other.

Think of it like this

It's like the world's road network. No single company built or owns all the roads - local streets join bigger roads, which join motorways between cities and countries - but because everyone follows the same rules of the road, a delivery can get from any address to any other.

What's happening

Diagram showing computers around the world connected by cables and wireless signals

Summary

The internet is a worldwide network of networks, linked by cables, fibre, and radio, that lets any connected device send information to any other by following shared rules.

A Closer Look

The internet connects devices all over the world so they can exchange information. It isn't one network but tens of thousands of separate ones - home networks, mobile networks, universities, businesses, and internet providers - all linked together, which is why it's often called a "network of networks." When you send a message or load a website, your device breaks the information into small packets that travel through cables, fibre-optic lines, and wireless links to reach their destination, often in a fraction of a second.

What makes this work is a shared set of rules called protocols. The most important pair, TCP/IP, defines how every device gets an address and how data is split up, sent, and checked on arrival. Because every network follows the same rules, a phone on a mobile network in Tokyo can talk to a server in a data centre in Ireland without either side knowing anything about the networks in between. The physical backbone is surprisingly literal: almost all traffic between continents travels through cables laid along the ocean floor.

Common Misconceptions

The internet and the web are not the same thing - the web (websites) is just one service that runs on top of the internet.
The internet isn't wireless by nature - much of it runs through physical cables, including undersea ones spanning continents.
No single company or government owns the internet - it's a shared, decentralised infrastructure.

How it connects

The internet is the foundation everything else runs on:

Servers - what you connect to over the internet Websites - delivered across the internet Cloud - services accessed over the internet Wi-Fi & Routers - how your home network joins the internet

Try it yourself

Open a new tab and visit any website - your browser just sent a request across the internet and received a response in milliseconds.