Internet backbone

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Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. This is a small look at the backbone of the Internet.

The Internet backbone refers to the main "trunk" connections of the Internet. It is made up of a large collection of interconnected commercial, government, academic and other high-capacity data routes and core routers that carry data across the countries, continents and oceans of the world.

Part of the extreme resilience of the Internet is due to a high level of redundancy in the Internet backbone and the fact that the Internet Protocol routing decisions are made and updated in real-time during use.

1 History
2 Overview
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] History

The original Internet backbone was the ARPANET.

In 1989 the NSFNet backbone was established, the US military broke off as a separate MILNET network, and the ARPANET was shut down.

A plan was then developed for expanding NSFNet further, prior to rendering it obsolete by creating a new network architecture based on decentralized routing.

With the decommissioning of the NSFNet Internet backbone network on April 30, 1995, the Internet now consists entirely of the various commercial ISPs and private networks (as well as inter-university networks), as connected at their peering points.

The term "Internet backbone" is now sometimes loosely used to refer to the inter-provider links and peering points. However, with the universal use of the BGP routing protocol, the Internet functions with no single central network at all.

With the occurrence of the dot-com bust in 2000, a number of major telecommunications carriers were threatened by bankruptcy, and some failed completely: for example, the EBONE network was decommissioned in its entirety. This served as a successful test of the level of fault-tolerance and redundancy of the Internet.

[edit] Overview

The Internet backbone consists of many different networks. Usually, the term is used to describe large networks that interconnect with each other and may have individual ISPs as clients. For example, a local ISP may provide service to individual homes or business using bandwidth that it purchases from another company with a backbone network. Backbone networks are usually commercial, educational, or government owned, such as military networks.