Networks & The Internet
How packets cross oceans through submarine fiber-optic cables, navigate 115,000 autonomous networks via BGP, and resolve domain names to encrypted sockets in milliseconds.
Pieces in this series
How the Internet Actually Works
Submarine fiber cables, autonomous systems, BGP path routing, and the physics of packet switching
The internet is not a mystical cloud or a satellite mesh. It is a physical lattice of 500+ undersea fiber-optic cables and 115,000 independent commercial networks called Autonomous Systems, dynamically routing 1,500-byte packets via…
What Happens When You Type a Website Address
URL parsing, recursive Anycast DNS, ARP, the TCP 3-way handshake, TLS 1.3 key exchange, and browser DOM rendering
When you press Enter on a URL, your device triggers an orchestrated millisecond cascade across all seven layers of the OSI model: parsing the URI scheme, traversing recursive Anycast DNS, resolving local hardware MAC addresses with ARP…
How Packets Actually Travel Across the Internet
From MTU slicing and IP headers to BGP router forwarding, submarine fiber lasers, and TCP reassembly
The internet does not transmit continuous files or dedicated circuits. Every video stream, webpage, and message is chopped into packets—typically 1,500 bytes each. Stamped with IP destinations, evaluated by core routers in nanoseconds…
How Fiber-Optic Cables Carry Light Across Oceans
From Snell's law and total internal reflection to 1550 nm silica windows, Erbium-doped optical amplifiers, and 10,000-volt seabed repeaters
Roughly 99% of intercontinental internet traffic travels through hundreds of submarine fiber cables laid across the ocean floor. Inside a cable no thicker than a garden hose, hair-thin silica glass strands trap infrared laser pulses via…
How the Domain Name System (DNS) Resolves Names Across the Planet
From ARPANET's centralized HOSTS.TXT bottleneck to 13 anycast root server clusters, iterative referral chains, authoritative zone files, and DNSSEC cryptographic trust
When you type a web address into your browser, the global internet cannot route packets to text names—it operates exclusively on numerical IP addresses. The Domain Name System (DNS) translates human names into machine addresses in…
How Fiber-Optic Cables Transmit Light Across Oceans Without Signal Loss
From Snell's total internal reflection and ultrapure silica synthesis to erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs), chromatic dispersion management, and dense wavelength division multiplexing
Over 99% of all intercontinental internet traffic travels not through satellites, but through hair-thin glass fibers resting on the ocean floor. By exploiting total internal reflection in ultrapure silica cores, optical repeaters using…
In the scriptorium — this series continues to unfold