telephone companies. It has capacity for more IP addresses than the shorter IPv4 structure. The Impact of Capacity-The Availability of Broadband Networks An important factor in the wide use of the Internet in everyday life and business is the availability of high- capacity broadband and cellular services. This availability exists in Western Europe, North America, much of Asia, parts of Africa, and in the Middle East. The capacity and availability of the networks that make up the Internet are enabled by technologies such as fiber- optic cabling and the supporting electronics connected to it: lower-cost, smaller graphical processor chips in wireless handsets and laptops; faster computers; and improved compression to support multimedia video streaming and high-capacity content downloads. These improvements, along with search engines, enhance the user experience for consumers and businesses alike, as do improvements in web site designs. www.TechnicalPDF.com The Public Network Prior to the Internet At the time the Internet was developed and through the 1990s, the public switched telephone network, which carried only voice, was made up of large central offices called tandem offices. Smaller central offices were connected in a hub-and-spoke design to each tandem office. If the tandem office crashed, all the local central offices were also out of service. The designers of the Internet wanted to avoid this centralized control where an outage at a central or tandem office disabled large swaths of the public telephone network. The Internet-A Distributed Network with No Central Control The Internet is a distributed network with no single ISP (Internet Service Provider) or other entity controlling it. It's a distributed network in which multiple carriers manage particular parts of the network. If a router crashes, other routers send traffic along alternate paths in the Internet's backbone. The backbone is the part of the Internet that carries traffic across the country between cities and states, and between countries. Althoug