Published on 2023-01-30
Could be Interesting!Though we live in an increasingly wireless world, that connectivity depends on fiber cables laid on the ocean floor.
Everything that we do on the Internet involves packets. When we browse the web, packets are sent from our computer to the server hosting the website we are visiting. When the website returns our requests, they are sent to us in packets.
Everything that flows through a network connection is called data. This data is broken up into manageable chunks called packets. When you send or receive information, your computer communicates with the server by sending these packets back and forth. And how these packets travel? By Sea! They are pirates! 😮
https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ = wires connecting internet users (data packages go through these wires to reach to the servers residing in data center)
Here's a pretty good explanation of a packet's tale from World Science Festival. Normally, I am not one to advocate the video but that video is pretty good! It covers - Domain Name Lookup (example: looking for boring-is-good.com in Internet Hub - think of it like a phone book with domain names and IP Addresses Location) then directing the packets to - Data Center (where IP Address resides with the physical server) in high-level overview without going much in details.
But please note the video doesn't cover that in the web, there are dynamic and static contents. Example of static contents are images, CSS file, videos, etc. These contents do not interact with users. Therefore, they are hosted in CDN (Content Distributed network) also known as Edge Server or caching server, reducing the latency to load the web page when original server locates far from the requester. The requester is routed to CDN closer to their locations for loading of these contents. (So, if you reside in east and accessing the website from west, you are routed to CDN in east to load the videos in website so as packets do not have to travel across the sea!)
Also, even though web clients are usually browser such as IE, Firefox or Chrome, they can also be headless browsers and command Line Utility such as cURL or web crawler. Isn't it amazing?! 😎
Interesting read: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/this-map-shows-how-undersea-cables-move-internet-traffic-around-the-world/