Telecommunications Essentials

The Organization of the Internet

It's important to understand what the Internet infrastructure is composed of and how it's structured in terms of the large variety of players that are represented in the Internet space. It's also important to keep in mind that similarly to the PSTN, the Internet was not originally structured for what we're asking it to do now.

Initially, the Internet was designed to support data communications—bursty, low-speed text data traffic. It was structured to accommodate longer hold times while still facilitating low data volumes, in a cost-effective manner. (That was the introduction of the packet-switching technique, whereby through statistical multiplexing long hold times don't negatively affect the cost structure because ...