Modern Backbone
Because of the enormous overlap between long-distance telephone networks and backbone networks, the largest long-distance voice carriers such as AT&T Inc., MCI, Sprint, and CenturyLink also own some of the largest Internet backbone networks. These backbone providers sell their services to Internet service providers (ISPs).
Each ISP has its own contingency network and is equipped with an outsourced backup. These networks are intertwined and crisscrossed to create a redundant network. Many companies operate their own backbones, that are all interconnected at various Internet exchange points (IXPs) around the world. In order for data to navigate this web, it is necessary to have backbone routers, which are routers powerful enough to handle information on the Internet backbone and are capable of directing data to other routers in order to send it to its final destination. Without them, information would be lost because data does not know how to locate its end destination.
Read more about this topic: Internet Backbone
Famous quotes containing the word modern:
“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied ... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)