I know that we use radio waves to connect to the modem, but then do the wires run ALL THE WAY across the country, through the ocean, and to the country halfway around the world? And if so, how does that happen in 1-2 seconds?
In: Engineering
Yes, there is a network of wires that connect all the computers and smart devices on the internet around the world. (The last few meters can be wireless in many cases.)
Signals from you to some computer on the other side of the world can travel there and back in a small fraction of a second, since the signal travels at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light.
Thanks to the whole cloud thing however, you rarely end up talking to a computer that far away when communicating with a popular website. There most likely is a copy of the website hosted on a server much closer to you.
(For example I can get a reply back from the website of the Sidney Morning Herald in only 12 milliseconds which would only get me a quarter of the way to Australia from where I live if I traveled at the speed of light. This works because there is a copy of that website hosted closer to me than Australia.)
The actual process of getting the contents of the website to your computer involves quite a bit of back and forth between your computer an theirs.
There is also a bit of work involved in your computer finding out which computer they need to talk to and how all the computers between you and them decide which direction to pass messages on.
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