As you sit crawling the internet on your smartphone, desktop or snazzy laptop, it is easy to dismiss the work going on behind the scenes to get you your internet fix. Instead of cursing the offspring of your internet service provider when your router light goes off, take a look at the bigger picture.

Here are a few images that portray to the layperson how South Africa’s internet works.

Firstly the internet is a massive network of submerged fiber-optic cables and a large array of other technologies that connect millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks. South Africa is connected to the rest of the world by five submarine cables, namely the Wacs, Seacom, Sat-3, Safe, and Eassy cables.

Internet traffic is carried to the submerged cables, using the local fiber network seen below.

You connect to this network through what is called a “last mile” network, which includes your ADSL services or the mobile networks like 3G or LTE.

[ Source : MyBroadband ]