internet end-user or we can refer to common user normally doesn’t care about how internet works. what they really want is just internet access. what they now consider maybe just speed of their internet connection and amount data transfer quota they have. but sometime knowledge about how internet works is needed. for example to explain view questions about how to check whether or not out connection work, how to solve our miss-configuration settings, etc.

Internet model can serve as guide to answer these questions. internet model comes up with protocol classification. once you know where your need is in the internet model, it will be easier for you to determine the problem and solve or at least know why the problem happened.

these are how internet models map their protocols. there are 2 internet models, OSI and TCP/IP. what we use today is actually TCP/IP model, but OSI model can somewhat help us to understand the ideal internet model.

you can go to these wikipedia pages to learn mode about them :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP/IP_model