Packets and routes

New idea

How does a photo cross the planet?

You send a photo to a friend on the other side of the world, and it arrives in a second. But there is no single wire from your phone to theirs. So how does it get there?

The internet is a huge web of connected computers. Your photo is chopped into small pieces called packets. Each packet is sent on its own, like tearing a letter into pieces and mailing every piece separately.

Every packet carries a label with where it came from and where it is going, so it always knows its destination.

Along the way, packets pass through routers, machines that read the label and pass the packet on to the next machine, one hop at a time.