Packets Don't Travel Together. Here's What They Do. (opens in new tab)

Most people picture internet data moving the way a train moves: a connected sequence, car by car, from source to destination. The actual mechanism is closer to releasing a thousand paper planes into a hurricane and trusting that the right ones land in the right yard. That the system works as reliably as it does is one of the more underappreciated engineering achievements in computing. 1. Your Data Gets Cut Into Pieces Before It Goes Anywhere When you load a webpage or send an email, the opera...