The Internet Explained

The internet feels like magic, but it is not magic. It is a chain of small simple machines, one talking to the next, all the way around the world. When you tap on YouTube to watch a cricket highlight from a Pakistan India match, your phone is sending an invisible message that travels through five or six steps before the video comes back. Once you understand the steps, the slow days and the fast days both make sense, and you stop blaming the phone for things that are not the phone's fault.

Step one. Your phone has no wires. So it must speak through the air. It sends a small radio signal up to the nearest mobile tower. You have seen these towers everywhere in Pakistan, on top of the kothi at the corner of your gali, on the roof of the bara market, on the side of the highway between Lahore and Sialkot. The tower belongs to one company, Jazz, Zong, Telenor, or Ufone. Your phone is registered with one of them through your SIM card.

Step two. The tower receives your signal and pushes it into a thick wire that runs underground. This wire is the real internet. It travels under the road, under the canals, all the way to a big building called a data centre. There are data centres in Karachi and Islamabad. From there, the wire goes into the sea. Yes, the sea. Long fat cables thicker than your wrist run along the bottom of the Arabian Sea, under the ships, all the way to other countries. They come up in Mumbai, in Dubai, in Marseille, in Singapore, eventually reaching the building where YouTube keeps its videos.

Now you can understand why some days the internet feels slow. Reason one, load shedding. The mobile tower runs on bijli, the same as your fridge. When K Electric or LESCO cuts power, the tower switches to a small battery for an hour or two. After that, it slows down or stops. The whole street loses signal at the same time. The fault is not your phone or the internet, the fault is the wapda meter behind the tower.

Reason two, the monsoon. From July to September, heavy rain falls on the underground wires and the joints where they meet. Water seeps in. The signal becomes weak. PTCL and the mobile companies send men in trucks to fix the joints, but a city like Karachi has thousands of joints. Some take days to repair. If your YouTube has been buffering for three days during August, do not throw the phone, the rain is winning. Reason three, evening crowds. Between 8 pm and 11 pm, every cousin in your mohalla is also on Instagram. The same tower that easily handled you at 3 pm now has five hundred people pulling at it. Things slow down. Wait till morning, watch the same video, it plays without a hiccup.