How does the internet work in simple terms?
The internet is a network of networks. Your phone or laptop joins a local network (your home wifi or a mobile network), that network belongs to an internet service provider (ISP), and ISPs connect to each other and to the big networks run by companies such as Google or YouTube. Every device on it has an address, every message is broken into small packets, and every device follows the same set of rules for sending and receiving them [2][4].
The 2010 infographic by Jason Powers for MakeUseOf and OnlineSchools breaks this down into five steps: a shared language, addresses, how you get an address, how a request finds its way, and how the data physically moves [1]. Those steps still describe the internet well, even though the numbers on the graphic are now well out of date.
A shared language called TCP/IP
Computers made by different companies, running different software, can only talk if they follow the same rules. On the internet those rules are the Internet Protocol Suite, usually called TCP/IP after its two most important parts [1].
- IP (Internet Protocol) gives every device an address and moves packets of data from one address towards another.
- TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) splits a message into packets, numbers them, checks they all arrive and puts them back in order at the other end.
Packets are the key idea. A photo or web page is not sent in one piece. It is chopped into small segments, each with a header saying where it came from and where it is going, and the packets can take different routes before being reassembled. Because of this “packet switching”, billions of devices can share the same cables at the same time instead of waiting their turn [3].
The graphic says the internet’s protocols are overseen by the Internet Society, a non-profit set up in 1992 [1]. That date is right: the Society was formed in 1992 by Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn and other early internet pioneers [6]. In practice the technical standards are written by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which works under the Internet Society’s umbrella.
What is an IP address?
To send a packet anywhere, the network needs an address for the destination. That is the IP address. The older and still most common format, IPv4, is four numbers separated by dots, such as 93.184.216.34. Each number is one byte, so it can only run from 0 to 255 [5]. The example address on the infographic, 123.456.789.012, is a placeholder and could never be real, because 456 and 789 are both above 255.
IPv4 allows 4,294,967,296 addresses, which sounded like plenty in the 1980s. The central pool run by IANA ran out on 3 February 2011 [5], a few months after this graphic was published. The internet copes through IPv6, which uses far longer addresses, and by letting many devices in a home share one public address.
How do you get an IP address?
Your ISP holds blocks of addresses and gives you one when you connect. As the infographic explains, the address can be dynamic, meaning it can change when you reconnect, or static, meaning it stays the same, depending on your type of connection [1]. Most home broadband uses dynamic addresses; businesses that run their own servers often pay for static ones. The graphic also warns that ISPs keep logs of which address they gave to whom and will hand them over on a court order [1]. How long logs are kept depends on the country and the provider.
What happens when you type a web address?
People remember names; networks route by numbers. The Domain Name System (DNS) bridges the two. Cloudflare describes DNS as the phonebook of the internet: it turns a name such as youtube.com into the IP address of a server [4]. The infographic follows a request to YouTube step by step, and the same sequence happens every time you open a website:
- You type the address or tap a link.
- Your device asks a DNS resolver, normally run by your ISP, for that name’s IP address.
- Your request leaves your network and goes to your ISP.
- Your ISP hands the packets to other networks, often at an internet exchange point where many providers connect, until they reach the website’s provider.
- The website’s server sends the page back, again as packets, and your browser reassembles them.
The graphic calls the meeting point a NAP and expands it as “Network Access Protection”. In internet routing NAP meant Network Access Point, the 1990s forerunner of today’s internet exchange points [7]. Networks decide which route to take using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which Cloudflare compares to a postal service picking the best route between hundreds of thousands of separate networks [8].
How does the internet work physically?
Under all the software, the internet is cables, radio and light. Your computer turns whatever you send into ones and zeros. Those become electrical signals on a cable, radio waves over wifi or mobile, or, in the dial-up days the graphic was drawn in, sounds down a phone line. A router passes them to your ISP, which turns them into pulses of light in fibre optic cables for the long distances. At the far end the light becomes electricity again, then ones and zeros, then text, pictures, sound or video [1].
Most international traffic crosses the sea floor. TeleGeography tracks more than 600 active and planned submarine cables, with over 1.5 million kilometres in service in early 2026. For most of the way a cable is about as wide as a garden hose, and the glass fibres inside, roughly the width of a human hair, carry light fired by lasers [9].
How many people use the internet?
When the infographic was made in 2010, it counted about 1.8 billion internet users, or roughly one person in four [1]. The International Telecommunication Union estimates that about 6 billion people were online in 2025, 74% of the world’s population, up from 5.8 billion in 2024 [2].
Access is very uneven. In high-income countries 94% of people use the internet, against 23% in low-income countries. In Europe, the Americas and the CIS region, 88% to 93% of people are online, while the average for Africa is 36% [2].
Other figures on the graphic show how fast things moved even then. It notes that the internet reached 50 million users in 5 years, against 13 years for television and 38 years for radio, and that data centres already used about 1% of the world’s power, half of it for cooling [1]. Its tables of ISPs and connection speeds by country (South Korea led at 11.7 megabits per second, with the US 22nd at 3.8) are a snapshot of 2010 and should not be read as current.
Questions about how the internet works
What is the difference between the internet and the web?
The internet is the network itself: the cables, routers and protocols that move packets between devices. The World Wide Web is one service that runs on it, made of web pages linked together and loaded in a browser. Email, video calls and online games also use the internet without being part of the web.
Who controls the internet?
No single body. Thousands of separate networks are owned by ISPs, companies, universities and governments, and they agree to connect. Standards come from groups such as the IETF under the Internet Society [6], and the address and domain name system is coordinated by IANA and ICANN.
What is DNS and why does it matter?
DNS turns website names into IP addresses so your device knows where to send a request [4]. If DNS fails, sites can still be running but you cannot reach them by name.
How does data travel across the ocean?
Mainly through fibre optic submarine cables laid on the sea bed and buried near the shore. Lasers send light through glass fibres inside them [9].
Is wifi the same as the internet?
No. Wifi is a radio link between your device and your router. The router then connects to your ISP, and the ISP connects you to the rest of the internet [1].
Sources
- Jason Powers for OnlineSchools and MakeUseOf, How The Internet Works [INFOGRAPHIC], MakeUseOf, 1 August 2010, the original infographic.
- International Telecommunication Union, Facts and Figures 2025, internet use.
- Cloudflare, What is a packet?
- Cloudflare, What is DNS?
- Wikipedia, IPv4.
- Internet Society, Our history.
- Wikipedia, Internet exchange point, history of Network Access Points.
- Cloudflare, What is BGP?
- TeleGeography, Submarine cable frequently asked questions.
Last reviewed 2 November 2026
