How Does the Internet Work? | Explained in Under 10 Minutes

You're using it right now. You've used it thousands of times today. But how does it actually work?Lewis draws the most important distinction first: the internet and the web are not the same thing. The internet is infrastructure — cables, routers, physical hardware — and the web is just one application running on top of it. The real backbone is over 400 submarine cables sitting on the ocean floor, some at depths of 8,000 metres, each thinner than a garden hose, carrying 95% of all intercontinental data.The team work through the whole system from first principles: why data travels as packets rather than continuous streams, how routers decide where each packet goes next, what IP addresses and DNS actually do, and what physically happens in the milliseconds between you pressing Enter and a webpage appearing on your screen. Brian points out that a signal can travel from London to Sydney and back in about 80 milliseconds — roughly two-thirds the speed of light.Nelson brings in the geopolitical reality: when a volcanic eruption near Tonga severed their undersea cable in 2022, the entire nation lost international internet for five weeks. The cloud, it turns out, is very much made of physical things.Have a topic you'd love us to explain? Send your suggestions to [email protected] — we read every one!