A connection to the Internet must precede a connection to a Web site on the Internet. This lesson focuses on the various types of Internet connections. Beyond the various hardware and software used to establish a network connection, you must consider the internet bandwidth technologies or links used to carry the data. They determine how fast Web site data can be sent or received and these bandwidth technologies are the communications gateways between the various LANs of the Internet.

Data is transmitted throughout a network by a combination of pipes and supporting protocols. "Pipe" is a commonly used word for transmission wire. The measure of how much data can pass through a pipe is known as bandwidth. The size of a communications pipe is measured in terms of how many bits, or binary digits, it can transmit per second. The SlideShow below lists the types of pipes organized by speed, slowest to fastest.

A pipe is a method used to pass information from one program process to another. Unlike other types of interprocess communication, a pipe only offers one-way communication by passing a parameter or output from one process to another. The information that is passed through the pipe is held by the system until it can be read by the receiving process.
Pipes are primarily used in programming on Unix systems.

Internet Bandwith
In the next lesson, the various protocols for Internet connection technologies will be discussed in the next lesson.