The Make Controller makes it easy to get your project connected on your local network or on the internet via a standard sockets-based system, familiar to desktop programmers.  It provides a full TCP/IP network stack based on lwIP (lightweight IP), an open source project. The work to integrate it into FreeRTOS was done by the FreeRTOS project.

There are two main kinds of communication that programs tend to use: UDP and TCP. These are both supported on the Make Controller.  TCP is built on top of UDP and ensures that messages get where they're going, although it adds some slight overhead to do that.  If you don't know whether to use UDP or TCP, that's ok.  A couple of general guidelines can get you through most questions:

• If you're connecting to any kind of webserver or web application, you're almost for sure going to use TCP
• If you're communicating via OSC, chances are you'll want to use UDP
• If you absolutely need to know that your data gets where it's going, use TCP
• If you're sending lots of data and don't want the overhead of using TCP, use UDP

See the Network subsystem and Socket system documentation for more details.  There's also now a helpful wiki for lwIP - http://lwip.scribblewiki.com.