How Data Actually Travels: Packets, Protocols, and the Postal Service Analogy (opens in new tab)

Hi everyone 👋 Here is something that sounds impossible but happens billions of times a second. The email you sent this morning never travelled as a single message. Neither did this post. Neither did the last video call you were on. Every one of them was torn into small pieces first. Those pieces, called packets, were each stamped with an address, sent out individually (often by completely different routes through different cities and even different countries), and then reassembled at the dest...