We use the internet every day, but most of us have never stopped to ask what it actually is. Is it in the sky? In our phones? Somewhere in America? By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to explain it in plain words to anyone.
The internet is millions of computers around the world connected to each other, passing information back and forth.
That's it. No magic, no cloud floating above us. Just computers linked together, sending information to one another.
And when we say "computers," we don't only mean laptops. Your phone is a computer. So is a smart TV, a POS machine, and the giant machines that store Instagram photos and bank records. If it can connect and send information, it's part of the internet.
Picture a road network
Think about Nigeria's roads.
- There are small streets in your estate.
- Those streets connect to bigger roads in your city.
- Those roads connect to highways that link Abuja to Lagos, Kano, Port Harcourt.
- Trucks move along these roads, carrying goods from one place to another.
The internet works the same way:
| On the road | On the internet |
|---|---|
| Your street | Your Wi-Fi or mobile data |
| City roads | Your network provider (MTN, Airtel, Glo, etc.) |
| Highways between countries | Huge cables, many of them running under the ocean |
| Trucks | Small packages of information |
| Goods | Messages, photos, videos, webpages |
When you send a voice note, it doesn't fly through the air straight to your friend. It travels along these "roads," from your phone, through your network, often across long-distance cables, and finally to your friend's phone.
Yes, the internet runs under the sea
This surprises most people. A large share of the world's internet traffic travels through cables laid along the ocean floor, connecting continents. Several of these cables come ashore in Lagos and link Nigeria to Europe and the rest of the world.
If you remember a time when the internet across Nigeria suddenly became very slow or stopped working for days, and it wasn't just your network, a damaged undersea cable is often the reason. When a major highway is blocked, traffic either crawls through other routes or doesn't move at all.
Information travels in small pieces
When you send something large, like a video, it isn't sent as one big lump. It's broken into thousands of tiny pieces called packets.
Think about moving house. You don't carry your whole house in one trip. You pack everything into boxes, number them, load them onto different vehicles, and unpack and arrange them at the new place.
The internet does the same thing:
- Your video is split into small packets.
- Each packet is labeled with where it's going and what number it is.
- The packets travel, sometimes by different routes.
- At the other end, they're put back together in the right order.
This is why a video sometimes loads in bits, or a picture appears blurry first and then sharpens. Packets are still arriving.
The internet vs. the web: not the same thing
People use these words as if they mean the same thing. They don't.
- The internet is the roads: the whole network of connected computers.
- The web is websites: pages you open in a browser like Chrome or Safari.
The web is just one kind of traffic on the internet. Plenty of other things use the same roads without being websites:
- WhatsApp messages
- Emails in the Gmail app
- Video calls
- Online games
- Your phone downloading an update
So when you scroll through a website, you're using the web and the internet. When you send a WhatsApp message, you're using the internet, but not the web.
This matters for this class: we're learning to build websites, which means we're building things for the web. The internet is simply the road system our websites will travel on.
Key words
- Internet: The global network of connected computers.
- Network: A group of computers connected to share information.
- Packet: A small piece of information sent across the internet.
- Web: The collection of websites you visit through a browser.
- Browser: The app you use to open websites (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge).