HOW DOES THE INTERNET WORK?


The internet is a global network of millions of computers that can communicate with one another. Information can he sent and received across the network in the form of text, pictures, video and sound. Home computers often connect to the Internet using a normal phone line and a modem — a device that connects the computer to an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Businesses and other large organizations may have their own network, known as a Local Area Network (LAN), which connects to an ISP with a high-speed link.



Everyone’s talking about the internet and whether, or how, it should be regulated. But not enough people know how the internet actually works—or what exactly the internet is.



You probably have your own “local area network” at home, and it’s made up of all the devices connected to your router, which connects to the internet. The word “internet” refers to a worldwide system of “interconnected computer networks”.



That’s all the internet really is—a large number of computer networks all over the world, connected together. Of course, there’s a lot of physical hardware—from the cables under your city streets to the massive cables on the ocean floors to satellites in orbit around the planet—that makes this communication possible. There’s also a lot of software at work in the background, allowing you to type in a website address like “google.com” and have your computer to send information to the physical location where that website is located in the fastest way possible.



Even when you’re just connecting to a single website, there’s a lot more going on under the hood. Your computer can’t directly send a piece of information, or “packet” of data, to the computer hosting the website. Instead, it passes a packet to your home router with information about where it’s going and where the web server should reply. Your router then sends it to the routers at your internet service provider (Comcast, Time Warner, or whoever else you use), where it’s sent to another router at another internet service provider, and so on, until it reaches its destination. Any packets sent back to your system from the remote server make the reverse journey.



To use an imperfect analogy, it’s a bit like sending a letter in the mail. Your local postal employee can’t just grab the letter and take it directly across the country or continent to its destination address. Instead, the letter goes to your local post office, where it’s sent to another post office, and then another one, and so on, until it gets to its destination. It takes longer for a letter to get to the other side of the world than the other side of the country because it has to make more stops, and that’s generally true for the internet as well. It will take a bit longer for packets to go longer distances with more transfers, or “hops”, as they’re called.



Unlike with physical mail, sending data packets is still very fast, though, and it happens many times a second. Each packet is very small, and large numbers of packets are sent back and forth when computers communicate—even if one is just loading a website from another one. A packet’s travel time is measured in milliseconds.





Picture Credit : Google



 




 



WHY DO COMPANIES ADVERTISE?


Companies use all forms of media to advertise their products and services. advertising began simply as a way of telling people about a product, but it is now much more sophisticated. It is used to present the image of a company in a certain way and also to target a particular audience that the company feels it can attract. In this way, the company associates itself with a certain lifestyle. Advertising is a huge business, with large companies investing huge sums of money in anything from sports sponsorship to putting their logo on the side of a milk carton.



Companies use advertisements as part of a marketing program to increase sales of their products and services. Advertising plays a different role at different stages of the marketing process -- helping to raise awareness of a product or service, generating leads for a sales force or selling directly. Companies with retail outlets use advertising to make consumers aware of product availability and increase sales through the outlets.



Awareness



Companies use advertising to make customers and prospects aware of the features and benefits of their products. If customers are not aware of your product, they will not consider it when they next make a purchasing decision for the type of product you offer. Advertising puts your product into the consumer’s set of choices.



Brand Preference



Advertising can build a preference for your product over competitors’ offerings. Your advertising messages must reflect the information that customers feel is important when choosing a product. It must also stress the quality of your product. By advertising regularly, you can reinforce the brand messages so that your product becomes first choice when the consumer next makes a purchase.



Direct Sales



Use direct response advertising to sell products directly to customers. The advertisement includes details of the product and its price together with a telephone number or website address where customers can order the product.



Retail Development



Advertising details of retailers or distributors that stock your products builds sales by driving traffic to the outlets. The advertisements can provide information on retail outlets or promote special offers available at those outlets. This type of advertising can also help you promote your products to distributors and retailers.



Lead Generation



If you market products and services through a sales force, you can use advertisements to generate leads for the team to follow up. Include a response mechanism in the advertisement such as a reply coupon, telephone number or email address so that customers can register their details in return for an incentive offer. Examples of incentives include free copies of special reports for business customers or gifts for consumers.



Reputation



When a prospect is selecting a supplier for a major purchase, company reputation is an important factor in the decision. Use advertising to build a positive perception of your company. Reputation or corporate advertising communicates messages about factors such as your company’s achievements, financial stability, market success and innovation record.




Picture Credit : Google



WHAT IS MASS MEDIA?



Certain forms of media, particularly television and newspapers, are able to communicate to thousands or even millions of people at the same time. These mass media can have a very powerful influence on their audience, and often reflect the particular view-point of the media-owner.



Think about this for a second: whenever you want to hear your favorite song, watch your favorite show, or see the latest current events, where do you go? You more than likely turn on your television, radio, or computer. The source that the majority of the general public uses to get their news and information from is considered mass media.



Mass media means technology that is intended to reach a mass audience. It is the primary means of communication used to reach the vast majority of the general public. The most common platforms for mass media are newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the Internet. The general public typically relies on the mass media to provide information regarding political issues, social issues, entertainment, and news in pop culture.



The mass media has evolved significantly over time. Have you ever wondered how the latest news and information was communicated in the past? Well, before there was the Internet, television, or the radio, there was the newspaper. The newspaper was the original platform for mass media. For a long period of time, the public relied on writers and journalists for the local newspapers to provide them with the latest news in current events.



Centuries later, in the 1890s, came the invention of the radio. The radio would soon supersede the newspaper as the most pertinent source for mass media. Families would gather around the radio and listen to their favorite radio station programs to hear the latest news regarding politics, social issues, and entertainment.



Later on down the line came the invention of the television. The television would soon replace the radio for the most effective platform to reach the general public. Today, the Internet is the most relevant form of mass media and has become a major tool for news outlets. Since the evolution of the Internet, the general public is now able to access those same news outlets in an instant with just a click of a mouse, instead of having to wait for scheduled programs.



Picture Credit : Google


HOW IS INFORMATION SENT AROUND THE WORLD?


In the modem world, we can access information in ways that could only be dreamt about just 50 years ago. Information can travel around the world via television, radio, telephone and computer networks, all of them connected by satellite or cable links. Modern communication systems, or media, allow almost anyone to transmit and receive verbal, visual and written information wherever they are in the world.



Optical communications networks provide the underlying high-capacity, ubiquitous connectivity that underpins the global Internet Characterizes the growth of communication and computing between 1986 and 2007, based on a broad collection of data. Around the year 2000, Internet traffic took over from voice telephone as the single largest communication format for information. Now Internet traffic dominates completely. All of the long-distance communications on the Internet are over optical fiber.



Major advances in transmission techniques and technologies have allowed network providers to provide extremely cost-effective network upgrades that have kept pace with the extraordinary appetite for broadband Internet services. That growth, as exemplified in has driven network bandwidth demands by a factor of 100 over the last 10 years. That increase has been enabled by realizing the full potential of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) that has resulted in fibers carrying as many as 100 separate wavelengths. In addition, the capacity per wavelength in commercially deployed terrestrial networks has increased from a maximum of 10 gigabits per second (Gb/s) per wavelength when the first edition of Harnessing Light was published in 1998, to 100 Gb/s today. As a result, per fiber transmission capacities in terrestrial systems today as high as 5-10 terabits per second (Tb/s) are possible. Transoceanic capacities have lagged somewhat behind terrestrial values because the long amplifier-only distances and the desire to extend the amplifier spacing have made upgrading to per wavelength capacities above 10 Gb/s problematic. Nevertheless, transoceanic per fiber capacities of approximately 1 Tb/s are typical. For the future there are expectations that this growth will continue as more video content calls for bandwidth and that there is a need for another factor-of-100 growth in the coming 10 years as well.



Major advances have also been achieved in both cost-effectively managing the large capacity in today’s WDM optical networks and in leveraging the value proposition of optical amplifiers to provide multi-wavelength amplification over network mesh and ring architectures. Reconfigurable, wavelength-routed networks—in which wavelength-defined units of capacity can be added, dropped, or switched from one fiber route to another fiber route directly in the optical domain without the need for conversion to electronics—are now heavily deployed in long-haul terrestrial networks as well as metropolitan networks. Wavelength-routed networks provide cost-effective solutions because they allow data on wavelengths passing through a node at a multi-route network node to remain in the optical domain and benefit from the cost-effective multi-wavelength amplification enabled by optical amplifiers, rather than needing to be individually electronically regenerated. The large increase in capacity demand has ensured that a prerequisite for the economic viability of such networks—namely, that the capacity demand between any two node pairs on the network be at least as large as that which can be carried by a single wavelength—is met.



WDM optical networks require reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs) to, under network electrical control, drop or add wavelength channels at a node and to switch wavelength channels from one fiber route to another. ROADMs are key enablers that have evolved significantly in their functionality, providing increasing levels of flexibility, and in their capacity, or number of fiber ports and wavelengths per fiber, over the last decade. Further progress in these network elements and their enabling technologies will be essential to addressing the growing demand for capacity.



Ultimately, networks are no better than the access capacity that they provide to the end user, whether that customer is a business or a residence. Increasingly that access is through an optical link. The last decade has seen significant increase in the deployment of fiber in the access network, initially to the curb, but increasingly also directly to the business or home.