The Internet
The Information Superhighway
by Sharlee Plett
You've probably heard the Internet being referred to as the "Information Superhighway" and that's a really good way of thinking about it.
It is really similar to our system of freeways, highways and roads that allow us to drive almost everywhere, except these roads are made of cables, satellites and microwave links.
The roads are your telephone line or cable line, which connect to your ISP (Internet Service Provider). The highways are the lines that go from your ISP to the major backbone providers, which are really telephone companies. The freeways are the major cables and lines that are strung across the country and world by the telephone companies. They are referred to as backbones or sometimes as "the cloud".
Routers are a type of computer that connects the lines and cables to one another. The various lines and cables that form the Internet can become overloaded with traffic. Like a policeman on a very busy road, the router may detect that there is a traffic jam on one of the routes, so it sends the data along a different route that is less congested.
