A
brief background
The Internet is made up of many different networks (a network
is a bunch of computers all connected together so they can talk to one
another) all over the World connected to one another by various means.
Our network here at IGG is connected to two other networks, Verio and
UUNet, and they in turn are connected to many other networks.
Verio and UUNet are what are referred to as Internet Backbone
Providers. Most of the information that travels over the Internet does
so through an Internet Backbone provider. There are many Internet
Backbone Providers such as Sprint, MCI, GTE and others. The more
connections you have to these different providers the more ways there
are for the Internet Traffic to flow. You can think of it as looking
at a map. The Highways are the Internet Backbones and all the streets
off that Highway are smaller networks connected to that backbone.
When your computer dials into our service it becomes a part of our
network. Because your computer becomes a part of our network it can
now access our connections to the Internet through our connections to
the Internet Backbone providers. Once your computer opens its road to
the Internet it is assigned a number. Think of this number as your
street address on your open road to the Internet. When you send email
or request a web page that number is used as a return address. When
the place you sent the request or email to gets the request or email
it knows where to send the answer back to.
When you send an email or click on a web page certain things happen.
Lets follow a car (packet) as you request the page www.yahoo.com
be displayed on your computer. It goes from your computer through your
modem and then to your Internet Provider. At the Internet Provider it
will ask for the number address of www.yahoo.com.
Computers only understand numbers so your request must first determine
what the number is for yahoo.com. Think of it as a toll booth (router)
stop that give directions. Now that you know the number, your car gets
out onto the information highway and proceeds down the highway. It
will stop at different toll booths and get better directions as to
where to go next. Once it gets to the address or number that you
requested it then fills up your car with the information you requested
and travels back down the highway. In this process you may take many
different streets to arrive at your destination. You may have gone
through many different networks and stopped at many different toll
booths. Any road construction or outages can cause something to happen
to your car along the way.
Because of the many different networks involved and all the
different equipment and different phone companies involved many things
can go wrong. Let's talk about a few of these things.
What can go wrong?
There are many things can cause an Internet Connection to stop
working. We will only discuss the ones that are the most common.
1) Phone line problems!
Since most of the connections made between all these networks are done
over phone lines the phone companies play a major role in their
reliability. The better the phone lines the better things are. The
phone lines that Internet Providers and Internet Backbone Providers
use are special types and usually don't have the problems associated
with normal phone lines. The phone lines that are used in homes are
not high quality and were not designed to be used for Internet
Connections. The phone company is only required by it's governing
bodies (The Public Utility Commission) to provide a connection that is
stable at 2400 baud. Today's modems push the phone lines to speeds as
high as 56k. This in itself presents most of the problems associated
with an internet connection. For example lets say your computer calls
a Internet Provider and your modem connects at 48,000 baud. You have
now become a part of that network and information is transferred from
the Internet to your computer at this speed. Think of it as the speed
limit on your little road coming off the highway. Now if you put some
speed bumps on that road things are going to slow down. Speed bumps
can be things like noise on the phone line, a bad connection at the
phone companies office, a bad phone jack in the house or a number of
other things. These all effect how traffic comes down your road.
Sometimes there can be a collision on the road and stop all the
traffic from coming down the road. These are things like the modems at
both ends of the connection quit talking to one another, there are to
many speed bumps so traffic does not come down the road, something has
happened to the computer on one end or another, the highway has become
jammed, and others. When things like this occur it is best to close
your connection (road) and reboot your computer or try starting
another connection. If things get really bad then calling the phone
company can help.
2) Computer problems!
The computer you use to connect to the Internet plays a major role
in how well your connection to the Internet works. It is your computer
that makes the call to the Internet to open your road (connection) to
the Internet. The type of modem you use, the software you are using,
the speed of your computer all effect how your connection to the
Internet will work. Bad software, bad hardware, improperly configured
software, can all cause problems with an Internet connection. Usually
such problems can be resolved by replacing the hardware or reloading
the software or reconfiguring settings. The technical support of most
Internet Providers can help you determine if the problem lies within
your computer or somewhere else.
3) Internet Backbone Problems
When an Internet Backbone has a problem with either equipment or a
down phone line or a bad computer it can cause the highway to shutdown
or slow up. Once your computer connects to the Internet and becomes a
part of the network the information you request will travel over an
Internet Backbone. In the example above where we followed your car
around the Internet it traveled over many different networks, or
streets if you like, to get to where it needed to go. Now suppose that
one of the streets you wanted to go down was blocked. This could be
caused by a down phone line or an equipment problem. Your car would
then have to backup and see if there was another street to go down
that takes it to the same address. Because of the way all the streets
are tied together there is usually more than one way to go. Hopefully
at the location the street is blocked there will be somebody there to
give your car directions around the blocked street to get it to where
it is going. Sometimes it may take a few minutes for everyone to know
the street is blocked and during that time all the traffic will still
be trying to come down that street and a major traffic jam will occur.
Once a crew gets to the street it will start telling cars how they can
go a different way to get to where they were going. This is all
handled by special equipment called routers. They monitor all the
traffic and tell each car the best way to go to get to where they are
going. Sometimes these routers fail. In a perfect world every router
on every network would know when a router was down and it would send
the cars down a different street. Unfortunately this is not the case.
So sometimes a human must get involved to manually tell the router
that a street is blocked and that the cars should be sent down a
different street. Once that happens all the cars can now get moving
again. Once the street is repaired it can then be opened again for
traffic.
4) Server Problems!
All Internet companies use some type of server to manage all the
traffic that comes down their road. These are special computers that
handle things such as web pages, Domain Name Services, Email, and many
other functions. Everything on the Internet depends on a server to
either direct traffic, hold a website, deliver mail and many other
things. If a server goes down or quits responding it can shut down all
roads that lead to it. For example if you request www.yahoo.com
and there server that hosts that web page goes down your little car
will not find any information to bring back to you once it gets to
where it thought it should go. It's like driving to a vacant lot.
Another problem that can occur is when a Domain Name Server goes down.
In our example earlier your car had to find the address number for www.yahoo.com
before it could start its journey down the information highway. It did
that by going to a Domain Name Server. You car would first stop at the
Domain Name Server closest to you and see if it knew how to get there.
If not it would go to the next one and so on until if found where www.yahoo.com
was. If it was not able to find the address due to asking for the
wrong information or it ran into a Domain Name Server that was down it
would have no other choice but to return home and tell you that it
could not find the information you asked for. These are what are
called DNS errors. Sometimes you can just ask for your car to try
again and it will be able to find the address. Sometimes you need to
tell your car that you put in the wrong information and you really
want it to go somewhere else. Usually most Internet Companies have
more than one server so that if something happens to one there is
another to take its place.
As you can see there are many things that can happen to cause a
problem on the Internet. This is by no means a detailed explanation of
everything that can go wrong.
So what is IGG doing to minimize problems?
Some things are out of our control but the things that are in
our control we take very seriously. Internet Gateway is committed to
providing it's customers high quality service.
To do this we invest in what we believe is the best equipment. Having
good and reliable equipment from companies that have excellent tech
support means that if something breaks it can be repaired or replaced
quickly.
We are in the process of trying to eliminate any single point of
failure. This means that we should have redundant servers that can
take over for each other should one fail. We should have multiple
roads out to the Internet Highway so if one road gets blocked their
are other roads to travel down. We are in the process of still trying
to implement some of these things but hope to have them completed by
the end of the summer 2000.
We are keeping up to date on new technologies so that if something
better comes along we can evaluate it and pass it along to our
customers. We were the first to provide local ISDN in Georgetown. We
now offer DSL locally in Georgetown. We are also testing wireless and
satellite to see if it will meet our customers need. We want to
provide the services our clients need and desire. By keeping up with
technology we are able to determine if something will meet our
customers needs or make our services better.
System monitoring is done 24 hours a day so that if something goes
wrong our technicians usually know about it within minutes. The
will then determine the problem and correct it as quickly as
possible.
We provide 24 x 7 x 365 free technical support. We believe in
giving our customers the help they need when they need it. Any
problems experienced can be reported to our technical support for
assistance. They are there for you so feel free to use them.
Our door is always open. The management at Internet Gateway has an
open door policy. This means that you can always come in to see us and
discuss whatever is on your mind. We always try to have at least one
manager here so that if the others are out you can have somebody to
talk to. If you can't come to us we can surely come to you or be
available for your phone call.
We believe that our growth should be directed by the needs of our
customers. If you have suggestions or comments please feel free to
contact us. We will do everything we can to make things happen.
We pride ourselves in being the best that we can be. Were not going
to lie to you and say things have been perfect over the years we have
been in business. But we will say that when we have had problems we
are quick to respond and are straight forward with our customers. We
put this information on our web pages for anyone to look at. We don't
have anything to hide and look at each problem experienced as a way to
grow and improve.
We know there are lots of choices out there and the only way to be
set apart is to provide reliable and quality service. We believe we do
that and have many customers that have been with us through thick and
thin because they believe that also.
We hope you have found this information informative and
enlightening and welcome any comments you have.
Thanks for your time, Internet Gateway Staff
Send your comments to keith@thegateway.net. |
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