NET11 Topic 1.1 - What is the Internet?

This week I learnt that the Internet is not the vast interconnected web of sites or email.  It is the physical network of computers.  There are a couple of different types of networks (topologies) including the type I am presently using to browse the web and update thisblog (the client-server model).  Another type is the peer-to-peer (P2P) model.

We looked at a couple of networking fundamental concepts such as packet switching and TCP/IP. 
Domain names were explained as being the alphabetical names which are 'mapped onto' IP addresses.  If you take the domain name 'www.yahoo.com.au' the Top Level Domain (TLD) is the '.com' and the country name (.au) while the second level domain name is Yahoo.

We learnt about bandwidth, the different between kilobits and kilobytes, and tested the speed of our own connections here.  The speed of my connection at present is 421kbps for uploads.