Internet Turns 25 years old in India: Interesting facts

 

Hello friends and welcome again on your own tech guide i.e. TechAnalysia. So, today let me take you on a journey about the Internet in India. So without further wasting any time let's get started.

Yesterday, India celebrated its 74th year of independence, the country has reached yet another milestone. That day, twenty-five years ago, Indian citizens accessed the Internet for the first time.

Internet Turns 25 years old in India: Facts

From Rs 5,000 for 9.6 kbps in 1995 to Rs 7 for 1GB in 2020

Those were different times, and the price of accessing the Internet didn’t come cheap. According to a Times of India report from August 15, 1995, the basic tariff for a single user was Rs 5,000 per month for a 9.6 kbps dial-up connection for 250 hours of usage. Fast-forward to today, and India has some of the lowest mobile data prices in the world at Rs 7 per GB. And, while accessing the Internet was reserved for a few elites in 1995; today, India has more than half a billion Internet users.

The Web is not the same as the Internet.

There is a big difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web or the Web. The Internet is a massive global network of networks, a networking infrastructure.  The Internet connects millions of computers around the globe, forming a network where computers can communicate with other computers so long as they all are connected to the internet. The Web, on the other hand, is a collection of information that can be accessed via the internet. Another way of looking at it is that the Internet is a big book store, while the Web is a collection of books in the store. The Web is just a single way of accessing information over the Internet.

The HTTP protocol is the most popular way to transfer information. However, there are other protocols as well, including- BGP, DHCP, DNS, FTP, and IMAP.

The Darknet

The darknet is a portion of the Internet that is intentionally hidden from search engines. The darknet network of secret websites exists on an encrypted network. The darknet is often used for nefarious and illegal activities such as illegal file sharing, the exchange of illegal goods and services, and black markets.

The anonymity of the darknet attracts hackers, drug dealers, hitmen, and people who peddle child pornography. However, the darknet can also be used as a force for good, primarily by Internet users who need to operate with anonymity. The darknet can be used to facilitate whistleblowing; it can act as a tool for individuals to circumvent censorship networks and protect political dissidents from reprisal.

We are all connected, Underseas!

Data sent by users across the Internet often travels overseas to reach its destination, to be more precise ‘underseas’. Around 99 percent of transoceanic data moves through undersea cables. This accounts for phone calls, text messages, and Internet usage. One can say that underwater cables are the invisible force that drives the Internet as we know it today. Today there are around 380 underwater cables in operation, spanning a length of over 745,645 miles. It seems somewhat ironic that even though we move towards a wireless future, all our communications are carried over wires undersea. There is an alternative to undersea cables in the form of satellites. However, they transport data eight times slower, so undersea cables don’t seem to be going anywhere, anytime soon.

50 Billion Connected Devices as of 2020?

The current global population is 7.8 billion as of August 2020. In 2018, Gary Davis of McAfee Inc predicted that the number of connected devices in 2020 would hit 50 billion, over six times the global population. The number includes devices, machines, and sensors that exist today. Experts also estimate the installation of 31 billion IoT devices in 2020, 127 new IoT devices are connected every second. The number of active IoT devices reached 26.66 billion in 2019.

The Internet has a huge Carbon Footprint

The Internet allows us to share files or connect with people around the world without any effort. However, this does not mean that your action does not impact the environment. While a single action like sending a mail or searching the Internet has a very small impact on the environment, when you scale that up to the over 4.1 billion Internet users, the numbers add up.

According to some estimates, “the carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet, and the systems supporting them account for about 3.7 percent of global greenhouse emissions”. Mike Hazas, a researcher at Lancaster University, suggests that this number is higher than that produced by the entire airline industry.

 There was Life before Google

Today, Google is the go-to search engine of choice for a vast majority of Internet users. But it isn’t just people, most businesses with digital profiles also rely on Google’s search engine. However, the first search engine, named Archie was launched in 1990, followed by Veronica and Jughead. Google didn’t arrive on the scene until 1998. While Archie, Veronica, Jughead, and Google were all search engines, all of them worked very differently. Google just happened to have the most effective method, and the rest is history.

Corporate Control

The web (World Wide Web) is free and open to all; anyone can launch a website. However, the vast majority of the top 100 websites are run by corporations, except Wikipedia. And as more businesses move online, this will only get worse. A prime example of this is Google, which is facing anti-competitive allegations around the world.

A spat with Goggle can also see your website dips in the ranking. Entrepreneurs and organizations generally find their business suffer when Google decided to tweak its Algorithms. Considering Google is the go-to search engine for the world, receiving 6.9 billion searches per day, there is literally nothing you can do about it. 

The Internet is not Indestructible 

We are so reliant on the Internet that it is hard to imagine modern life without it. From solar flares to EMP attacks, the Internet can survive just about anything, but that does not make it unbreakable. Remember those undersea cables that power the Internet, in theory; a mass cable cutting incident could break the Internet. In the past, these cables have also been disrupted by earthquakes. If you are wondering if there is a backup plan in the case of such an incident, the short and simple answer to that would be ‘no’.

.Few Fun Facts about the Internet 

Breaking the Internet seems too dark of a note to end on. So here are some fun facts about the Internet.

·         Over 55 percent of the over 4 billion internet users are Asians

·         The Internet has seven “Keyholders”, each of whom is a leading security expert. In the event of a global shutdown, these keyholders will be able to reboot an integral part of the system.

·         The first-ever transaction over the Internet was carried out by students from Stanford University in California and MIT in Massachusetts for a bag of marijuana.

·         At 91Gbps, NASA’s Internet connection is 13,000 times faster than the average user in the US.

·         The Centre for Interdisciplinary Science at the University of Leicester estimates that it would take less than one percent of The Amazon Rainforest to print everything on the Internet.

·         The first website is still online today. By the end of 1993, there were only 623 websites on the web. Today, more than 100,000 new dot com domains are registered on the web every day.