A decent portion of the net comes in a “plain, brown wrapper”, If you know what I mean..
Grin grin,
Wink wink,
Nudge nudge,
Say no more!
CC
Ted Stevens told me it was a series of tubes.
Introducing "the cloud" into the discussion just complicates things unnecessarily. The cloud is a physical place. A "farm" of computer servers in some huge warehouse somewhere. There is no one "cloud" there are thousands of them. Try to understand the similarities (and differences) between a desktop computer, a server and a "cloud." There are many tutorials on line; hundreds of them.
Bottom line, how the waves get to your computer is a radio problem, no different from a pocket radio, a car radio or any other radio. The only differences are the frequencies involved.
The other element is the antenna. Again, more related to radio, television and cell phones than to any other technology.
Stay off drugs.
your conflating various parts of the internet. the internet is the old school usa based network of networks. The WWW world wide web took that global but the “phone number directory” that lets you type in google and get to their WWW page is still in the USA internet hands (ICANN). Cloud was an online storage backup service, think a network connected ironmountain. With the development of the internet of things (your car, stove and thermostat will be “online” the cloud is moving from storage to SAAS or software as a service. Think of this as the morphing of a computer to a chromebook. you basically can’t use a chromebook unless your online.
Now all internet data is packeted. thus if you want a visual reference its like droplets from a faucet. the overall speed is dependent on the size of the pipe and the pressure of the data. Even fiber optics which may morph some day into a constant data transmission system is today sending discrete data packets. The only non packeted data transmission systems are old school radio waves and twisted copper phone(1960’s like stuff) (caveat there are some laser transmission systems that are time or distance measuring that are still analog)
Hope this helps
Think of it more like the town water supply.
If you are the only one running a tap, you get the full flow of water. If everyone in town is filling a bath at the same time, your tap can slow to a trickle, depending how far from the pumping station you are
What a cool question:)
An interesting take on the appearance of the net is in the book “Wake” by Robert J. Sawyer.
A blind from birth teen girl receives an experimental implant that enables vision, but there is something else going on...
The Internet comes on little cat fet.