Most people prefer the simplicity of clicking on an icon on their computer screen to access the Internet. However, after clicking they sit and wait what appears to be a long time before they connect. I think we can all gain a bit more patience when we realize the multitude of steps that must take place before the connection is made. Let us go through the sequence of steps necessary to make a connection:

1. The first step when you try to get on the Internet is for your computer to "talk" to a modem which is either mounted in your computer or mounted in a separate external box (such as the ISDN Motorola BitSURFR Pro). The computer sends the modem a string of "AT" commands to get it to start dialing the telephone line. If the modem doesn't respond, e.g. it is not turned on or is broken, you may get an error message and will not connect.

2. If the modem responds to the computer's inquiry, the next step is for the modem to go "off hook" on the telephone line and the telephone company sends it a dial tone. If the extension jack in your house is not wired properly or is broken, the modem will not receive a dial tone and you will get an error message. This might also happen if you have set up the software incorrectly in the dial up networking option in your computer software.

3. Having received a dial tone, your computer is in a position to make a telephone call to your Internet Service Provider (ISP). The ISP's phone lines might be busy - or often the call is hauled between telephone exchanges and the interconnecting trunk lines might be busy. This would result in a fast "all trunks" busy signal. If this doesn't happen there might be a problem with the telephone company or the ISP who doesn't have enough modems to answer a call. In this case you would get a regular busy signal. It is sort of like calling IRS for tax information on April 14th or your mortgage company about information on your home mortgage. If your modem has a small speaker in it you will know you got a busy and didn't connect. Otherwise, it might appear to be a mysterious lockup of your computer.

4. If you got through to your ISP, he has a communications server which is basically a box of modems connected to phone lines and the Internet. Your call will come to one of the modems in this modem pool. The ISP modem senses the call and answers it. Now begins an exchange of tones between the two modems as they talk to arrive at a common speed to operate at. This sounds like "birds" tweeting but is an attempt by the two modems to settle on a data speed which can be transmitted without too many errors over the telephone connection that has been set up. If you have a 56 kbps modem the two modems will start negotiation at that speed. They will try to send each other data. If there are errors in the data they will drop to the speed of 33.6 kbps. If there are significant errors at this speed, they will drop to 28.8 kbps and so on. This process takes time and if your telephone line is not good, setting up the modem to start the negotiations at a lower speed initially will speed things up. The connection speed indicated on your screen does not tell the whole story. It could just display a number that is set in your computer - or it could tell you the speed that this modem had connected at. It does not tell you the bandwidth you have available for downloads. If connection was made at 57.6 kbps, there still may be errors in the transmission. Testing companies have shown that most 56 kbps modems on real telephone lines will transmit file blocks out at no more than 40 kbps and this is downstream from the ISP to you only. Upstream speeds are about 24 kbps.

5. Once the modems begin communicating, your computer needs to send your user ID and password to the ISP modem. If it doesn't receive those encrypted (chap or pap) passwords in the proper protocol packets (ppp) the ISP modem will consider you an invalid user and drop the call. The information you send will be checked with a database of all other users on the system. Sorting through the list takes time for your name when large user databases are involved. Only after your information is validated are you connected to the Internet.

Everything that has happened up to this point was provided by a Dialer Program such as Microsoft's dial-up networking software. Its purpose is to get you connected to the Internet.

Once you are connected, you have to decide what service you want to take advantage of. The most common choices are to surf to a Web site or to access your email.

6. Once you are connected to the Internet, you will need a temporary address so that the other sites on the Internet can get back to you. This address is called an IP (for Internet protocol) address. It consists of 4 bytes of information with each byte separated by periods. The address of the Southshore Web site is 205.167.142.6. If you have Windows 95, you can go to "start" then run c:\winipcfg and you will see an IP address that you received to use for your current Internet session from the ISP communication server. (Sometimes the IP is available by restoring you dialup networking icon and looking at advanced settings.) The passing of this IP address is a separate step, and if it doesn't happen you won't be able to connect to your mail server or to a Web site because they won't know how to get back to you.

7. Assuming everything has gone smoothly you now have to decide whether you want a local or long distance Internet connection. If you are using NatcoNet as your ISP, there are about 40 server sites that are local as is your POP mail server. It is usually a good idea to home in for your first connection on a "local server" since this will tell you that all the prior steps are working and you can reach the basic Internet services.

8. Now if you want to go outside the local area to Yahoo, Microsoft or someplace else you can put the address in your browser and launch a query. If you put a name in the browser, the first thing that happens is for software to send out a packet to a domain name server (DNS) which will match the name you entered to its IP address. For example, if www.southshore.com is in your home page of your browser, a packet will be sent to a name server which comes back with the address 205.167.142.6. NatcoNet uses its Web server as its primary name server and it has two secondary name servers offnet in different parts of the country, 199.191.128.105 and 199.191.128.106. If you can't reach a name server, you can't connect to a Web site. It is important to have at least two listed in your software in case one is down. Going to a DNS can take some time. When there is a lot of traffic on the network, it will take a noticeable amount of time before your browser gets the IP information back for the site you requested.

9. Once your browser has the address of the site you want to reach, it can put the address on the data packets it is generating and send it to that site. To reach the location it might have to pass through 20 or more different routers on as many different networks to get to your requested site. Each of these routers can lose some of the packets. If it loses too many, the system will just stop, a time out will appear and you will get a message that the server is unreachable.

10. If enough packets reach the server, they tell the server to send out a page of information to the return address on the originating packet. Generally servers are quite busy and there are often delays for it to send data out.

11. At some point the server has sent out packets which are headed back toward you. The chain of routers the original packet had to go through to get to the site you wanted to reach is generally not duplicated for the return trip. They will probably take a different path on the way back. However, every router must know how to move the packet to you and the speed of each router in doing this depends on the traffic going through that router at that time of day. Since these routers are in different time zones and the exact path is uncertain, we can only cross our fingers and hope.

12. If all these steps are successfully completed the packets will finally reach your machine, allowing your software to assemble a Web page to look at.

If you click on an icon and expect a page to pop up instantaneously, you will probably have to wait a few years before your expectations are realized. These 12 steps take time. ISDN helps the situation but the fastest data speed on a file download I have observed at NatcoNet is about 75 kbps, even when I had a 128 kbps ISDN pipe to the Internet. I was attached to www.microsoft.com and receiving a 90 megabyte file. The server started sending data slowly and once it found I could receive it without error, it started speeding up. However, it couldn't send it faster than 75 kbps (multiply the Byte download speed by 8 to get the bit rate).

When I start an Internet session, I do not click on icon and expect a page to appear from a long distance site. I go through the steps of setting up a connection watching the IP come down. Once I know I am connected, I launch my browser which is set to www.southshore.com or e-mail to the local POP mail site. Only when these steps are successfully completed do I feel like I'm ready to go out and explore the world. If I have a problem leaving the local area, I try a site in Washington, DC such as www.fcc.gov which is sometimes very busy or www.opastco.org which is not very busy. If I can get to Opastco, then any other trouble I have is probably Internet backbone traffic or other problems over which I have no control. Like calling home on Thanksgiving. Better to hang up and try later.

Steven G. Sanders