What proportion of books do you now develop digital content for? Ros Lawler, Random House:
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Figure 3.2 shows how the client computers within homes and businesses are connected to the Internet via local
Internet service providers ISPs
which, in turn, are linked to larger ISPs with connection to the major national and international infrastructure or
backbones
which are managed by commercial organizations such as ATT, UUNET and Verizon. In the UK, at the London Internet Exchange in the Docklands area of east London, a facility exists
to connect multiple backbones of the major ISPs within the UK onto a single high-speed link out of the UK into Europe and to the world. These high-speed links can be thought of
as the motorways on the ‘information superhighway’, while the links provided from ISPs to consumers are equivalent to slow country roads.
Globally, there are many submarine cables which form the backbone between countries, which are susceptible to damage, for example in January 2008 a ship’s anchor severed a cable
in the Mediterranean resulting in a dramatic slowdown in Internet access for people in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and the Middle East.
Hosting of web sites and e-business services
While it is possible for companies to manage their own services by setting up web servers within their own company offices, or to use their ISP, it is common practice to use a special-
ist
hosting provider
to manage this service. For example, Rackspace Figure 3.3 describe itself as ‘Europe’s fastest growing hosting company’. Since 2001 Rackspace has been hosting
and supporting mission critical web sites, Internet applications, e-mail servers, security and storage services for over 4,000 customers. Rackspace also has US offices.
Figure 3.2
Physical and network infrastructure components of the Internet Levels IV and III in Figure 3.1
Local ISP
Access by: leased line or
phone line Local
ISP
LAN Home PC
client Business
e-mail or web server
Access by: phone line
or cable Global
ISPs Backbones
‘The Internet’
Business PCs clients
Part 1 Introduction
Internet service provider ISP
A provider providing home or business users
with a connection to access the Internet. They
can also host web-based applications.
Backbones
High-speed communications links
used to enable Internet communications across
a country and internationally.
Hosting provider
A service provider that manages the server used
to host an organization web site and its
connection to the Internet backbones.
We will return to the issues of selecting and managing a hosting provider later in this chapter.
The Internet timeline
The Internet is only the latest of a series of developments in the way that the human race has used technology to disseminate information. Kampas 2000 identifies ten stages that are
part of five ‘megawaves’ of change. The first six stages are summarized in Table 3.2. It is evi- dent that many of the major advances in the use of information have happened within the
last hundred years. This indicates that the difficulty of managing technological change is likely to continue. Kampas goes on to speculate on the impact of access to lower-cost,
higher-bandwidth technologies.
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Figure 3.3
Example hosting provider Rackspace www.rackspace.com