Home Connects to a network..
Consider that your home with few PCs were connected to another network (understand that network is your ISPs network where millions of your ISPs customers all connect to) through a modem or a basic router.
Your office connects to a network..
Consider your office networks with few hundred PCs were connecting to the same ISP for Internet access of employees.
ISPs (Internet service providers) connects to a network..
Understand some country’s have thousands of ISPs. Each having many millions of customers connecting to them.
IPPs ( Internet presence providers) connect to a network..
Now understand IPPs (Internet presence providers – these are companies who host websites, run e-mail servers etc… Sometimes ISPs and IPPs may be the same).
Understand that there are thousands of such IPPs in the world who connect to the same network where the ISPs were connecting to.
Large Universities connect to the same network..
Understand there are large university’s with thousands of computers, servers, web servers (we will explain web server little later), e-mail servers etc… and they connect to the network where ISPs and IPPs connect too.
Now we have a network where millions of PCs, thousands of web servers, e-mail servers, ftp (file transfer protocol) servers, database servers, security equipment like firewalls, all connected together in a network.
Millions of network equipment connects all the above said servers and PCs together.
This interconnection is distributed across continents, countries, cities, small villages and the whole of the globe.
Now we come to the answer for our question, what is Internet?
The above illustrated, interconnected, massive, global, network of computer equipment is called the Internet.