Today we're going to look at the first of three articles on the Internet and access to it.

The Internet has been around since the late eighties. It started life as a Defence Research Project in the US Military. By the mid-nineties, its commercial value was starting to be realised, as the prevalence of IP technology (more later) grew.

By the late-nineties, we see explosive growth of Internet use, due mainly to its move from just being a defence project, the acceptance of Internet browsers, dial-up access to the burgeoning internet, and use of e-mail.

As of now, there are in excess of one billion internet users ? just short of one-sixth of the global population. In 1996, there were 15 million users, which illustrates the staggering growth that has occurred.

In Bermuda most people have access to the Internet, either at home, school or at their workplace, and many have vocations that rely on it for communication with suppliers and customers, both here in Bermuda and abroad.

On such a small island, cut-off by 500 miles of ocean, Internet use is of much higher importance than elsewhere.

But what is it? Can we see it? The best analogy I can come up with is this: Imagine that Bermuda is made up of private roads: All of them ? private ? established by someone in the past with the specific requirement of connecting one house on one part of the island, with another on another part of the island.

Try to imagine that the road between our two houses (imagine you live in St Davids and I live in Southampton) was built by us for our sole use.

We spent the money setting it up, we are the only ones using it. Fred, who lives near you, wants to be able to drive to John's house, who lives near me.

Now he can spend the money to build his own dedicated highway between his and his friends, or he can come to an arrangement with us that he use our stretch of private highway to cover more than 90 percent of his journey.

His cost will be way smaller than if he had to invest in his own highway, and we get some revenue to boot. Now imagine that two friends ? one in Somerset and one in St David's want to drive between each others houses.

They know of the existence of our stretch of highway, and lets presume that other people have stretches of highway between, say Somerset Bridge and Rockaway, and Flatts and the Causeway.

The friends in Somerset and St David's, can make mutually beneficial arrangements with the owners of these three stretches of highway, and with a little further investment to connect each of the three, can get all the way from one house to the other.

Now imagine, years later, that private roads criss-cross the island and, with mutually beneficial payment transactions, everyone can actually reach everywhere on the island.

Now imagine that all of these individuals NOW agree that in the long-run, the payment and receipt of payments for using the particular stretches of road breaks-even, and it is simply a money shunting exercise that makes no-one any money, so by total agreement, they agree they are now not going to charge each other.

We have created, over a series of years, a free road network. Granted, there will be a requirement to pay for its upkeep, but in general we have evolved a previously private road network into a free-to-use, go-anywhere road network.

If we translate that into a communications network and expand it globally, we have a basic, very crude analogy which (hopefully) outlines how the internet came into being, and what it actually is.

Next time we'll look at what we pay for in our internet access charges, and we'll look at the various access technologies available to us.

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