You buy it from a internet provider than when you get the modem you plug it in and it will send signals down telegraph poles to the Internet Service Provider (ISP) and they will connect you then you are ready to go start 'surfing'.

The term broadband is a vague description of Internet connection speed. I say vague because it depends on who you talk to as to how fast a broadband connection is. However generally broadband can mean any connection faster than 64kps.

Next broadband doesn't describe the technology used to connect you to the Internet. There are multiple various technological methods to provide fast Internet connections. These can be ISDN ISDNII ADSL DSL RDSL CABLE WIMAX. Each one uses a different method.

Probably the most prevalent of these is ASDL which stands for asynchronous digital subscriber line. This uses an electrical signal which varies in amplitude (how strong the signal is) and phase (at what position in the waveform the signal is) to encode a number.

This technology is an answer to a specific question that of how to transmit high speed signals over a copper wire that can only really support low frequency signals, and because of that, this technology has it's limitations.ADSL's amplitude component of the signal fades over a long piece of wire. TCPIP being a self error correcting system will reduce the transmission speed of a carrier that drops looses or corrupts packets. therefore ADSL can suffer from slow connection rates if this occurs. Generally speaking the further you are away from the exchange the less signal is received and the more likely it is to be corrupted. Until recently connections to ADSL were limited to about 5 miles from the exchange, however research by a number of companies has produced an ADSL repeater which can boost the signal.

On top of this low level connection system is the protocol which is carried by the ADSL signal. This is either PPPOE or PPPOA which are connection protocols. PPPOE stands for The Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) and PPPoA The Point-to-Point Protocol over ATM (PPPoA). It depends what kind of system your ISP uses as to which of these protocols are used to encapsulate packets over you internet connection.

The Inter NET(work) aka the Internet uses a protocol called TCP/IP (Transport Control / Protocol / Internet Protocol) to transmit numbers between computers. These numbers are encoded versions of programs, text and data.

The use of the word INTERnet is very important, originally many networks used different protocols (languages) to communicate between machines. The TCPIP protocol allowed for a method called encapsulation which allowed different protocols to be surrounded by TCPIP and therefore it allowed INTER-connectivity between NETworks sicne it could piggy back an unknown protocol on it. This meant that a Novel network (a different protocol) in New York could be connected to a Novel Network in Paris being piggy backed on TCP/IP.

Each time you connect to Microsoft.com you don't directly connect to the computer running the webserver at Microsoft. What actually happens is that your request is encapsulated by TCP/IP and then sent across lots of inter-connected computers to its final destination. You can prove this if you open a command prompt cli START>RUN>CMD in windows and run the command TRACERT www.Microsoft.com

You will see (nearly) all the computers that are engaged in getting you to your target. From my home is see in the order of seventeen computers sending my request bucket bridge style to Microsoft.

Your connection to a machine is almost never direct. If we were to draw a diagram of all the inter conencted machines of the planet it would start to look like a complex mesh network, it looks like a spiders web, hence the nickname "The Web". Everything you do on the internet is via third party computers, this is why you should NEVER assume that anything you do on the internet is private unless suitabley encrypted. Anyone monitoring the packets of data at your ISP can watch what is being done and from the method, ports and data sent can interpret exactly what program is being used to send that data. The likelyhood is that they probably arn't, but you can never tell. There is a big market at the moment with programs that can do this in an automated way for use by security and copyright protection at ISP's. These "Man in the middle" programs can even display what is on your screen without any malicious software at your end being involved.

Finally we get to the stuff you know, the browsers and general interface stuff. theres a lot more going on in networking.

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