4 replies to this topic

[Ne0n]

I always used to forget the difference between these two before I started writing a lot more networking code.

The Internet is a massive amount of computers connected together.

Ethernet is a way of connecting computers together. If you have a home network your computers are most likely using an Ethernet connection. It runs can run at four speeds (10 mbps, 100 mbps, 1000, mbps, 10 gbps) depending on the type of cable you have and if your hardware can support it. Ethernet defines the physical attributes (how the wire is designed etc) and also has protocols specifying how the data should be sent across the wire. Ethernet also has a way to deal with collisions that occur.

Your Ethernet at home is one way to get a connection to the Internet. Computers that plug into just a DSL modem with no home network are most likely not using Ethernet.

But whats your views?

[onkarnath2001]

Phoneix, on Aug 8 2009, 09:00 PM, said:

I always used to forget the difference between these two before I started writing a lot more networking code.

The Internet is a massive amount of computers connected together.

Ethernet is a way of connecting computers together. If you have a home network your computers are most likely using an Ethernet connection. It runs can run at four speeds (10 mbps, 100 mbps, 1000, mbps, 10 gbps) depending on the type of cable you have and if your hardware can support it. Ethernet defines the physical attributes (how the wire is designed etc) and also has protocols specifying how the data should be sent across the wire. Ethernet also has a way to deal with collisions that occur.

Your Ethernet at home is one way to get a connection to the Internet. Computers that plug into just a DSL modem with no home network are most likely not using Ethernet.

But whats your views?

internet is a defined as an inter communication between networks.while ethernet is a hardware related word that means a hardware associated with a local area networking(LAN) that connects a wired connection with a jack to a pc.ethernet is generally 10/100mbps but fibre optical ethernets ports have higher speed and high cable length capacity also.

[The Simpleton]

Hmm I never stopped to think about the difference between these two, but in the end all that matters is whether or not I'm connected!

[k_nitin_r]

Neon,
The Ethernet is a standard that defines the physical and data link characteristics of the connection whereas the Internet works at a higher level and builds upon the Ethernet technologies, among others. What I mean to say that you can get connected to the Internet through an Ethernet network but it does not have to be the only way that you can get connected - you can have a Token Ring network instead of an Ethernet network that hooks up your computer to the Internet. Or think about the way we would get connected to the Internet back in the day - through dial-up modems that worked through the plain old telephone system with no DSL or ISDN wizardry.
Ethernet's approach of letting collisions occur and then dealing with is a simplistic way of dealing with a problem that many other comparable technologies have had to deal with. The approach works in small networks, but can be a source of inefficiencies in large networks that have a lot of computing nodes connected on the same network segment. Think of it as a way of getting the message across from participants in a crowd. When the only way for the participants to express themselves is to shout out their messages, that's when you have something comparable to the Ethernet technology. You can have two people shout out their messages at the same time and when that happens, you cannot listen to what either of them was saying so they would both stop yelling and then one of them would convey his or her message again. In other words, Ethernet works like an Ad Hoc network and with extensive checks to make sure that a message is sent again if a collision occurs. As you can imagine, when there are too many participants who have something to say, they would all try to scream and yell at the top of their voices and there would always be more than one participant saying something at the same time and it would be very hard to get exactly one participant to speak at any given time within the session of idea exchange. The same case occurs with computers when you have a lot of computes on the same network segment and all of them have data to be sent - imagine about a hundred computers that are in a video conferencing session and each of the hundred computers has webcam video to be streamed across to all of the other participants - now, that's what you would call a mess!
Your statement that computers that plug into DSL models do not use Ethernet may or may not be true. I have a DSL modem that enables me to connect my computer to it through either a USB interface or through an Ethernet interface. I typically use the Ethernet interface because I misplaced the USB cable and do not have the driver CD for the DSL modem any more to connect through the USB interface. I do not need any drivers to use the Ethernet interface so that is what I use all the time. Besides, because the Ethernet interface is so widely supported across Windows, Linux, and just about any other major operating system that is currently being distributed, I know that I can use my DSL modem with any operating system that I can possibly run on my computer, assuming that the operating system is not several decades old, and can still expect everything to work as I expect it to. Oh, and did I mention that my DSL modem comes with only one USB port but with four Ethernet ports? I did use the USB port to connect a really old laptop wither an Ethernet network interface card to the Internet once and the only reason I did use it was because there was no other way to connect the computer to the Internet without having to get out to visit a store and finding a PCMCIA network interface card for something I would only be using for a week or maybe even less because a computer that old simply cannot handle the stuff that web pages contain today (especially the embedded Flash objects and videos), but that is a story for another day and another discussion forum thread.
There are different kinds of Ethernet connections too - some Ethernet connections are half-duplex, meaning that data can either be sent or received at any particular time. Oher Ethernet connections are full-duplex, meaning that data can be sent and received at the same time. A full-duplex connection can essentially transfer data at twice the rated speed i.e. if you have a 100Mbps link speed, you will be able to transfer up to 200Mbps of data. However, when I say that the link speed is 100Mbps, that is the speed of the connection for a one-way transfer. The 200Mbps theoretical capacity can only be reached if both computers involved in the connection have data to be sent the other way. For example, if you are downloading a file, you would most likely be using only the one-way link with negligible control data being sent the other way. On the other hand, during a video conferencing session, data is being sent both ways so there you have the possibility of getting closer to using up the 200Mbps of available capacity, assuming that you are using high definition video and high quality audio with insanely high bitrates to provide ultra high clarity, though you would need a screen and speakers capable of providing output of such high qualities.
If you would like to understand more about networking protocols, I would recommend that you read a book by Andrew Tannenbaum. He's the same person who developed Minix, the operating system that Linus Torvalds looked at before he grew frustrated with its licensing restrictions and decided to develop Linux. BTW, wasn't Andrew Tannenbaum also the professor who commented that Linux wouldn't really get very far with a monolithic kernel? Sometimes software design and architecture isn't everything.