The Internet has no owner—yet trillions of packets cross oceans daily through a mesh of competing networks that somehow cooperate. Here's how the backbone actually works.
The Internet has a caste system. Tier 1 networks pay no one for connectivity. Everyone else pays tribute up the chain. Here's how the hierarchy works and why it matters.
How networks decide who pays whom: transit buys you global reach, peering trades it for free. These two arrangements shape every path your packets take.
MPLS lets routers stop thinking. Instead of examining every packet's destination and consulting routing tables, routers just read a label and forward—turning complex routing decisions into simple conveyor-belt mechanics.
SD-WAN shifts trust from expensive circuits to intelligent software, letting organizations combine cheap Internet links into something that performs like premium connectivity.
IPv4 and IPv6 can't talk to each other. The Internet has spent two decades building bridges between them—and will spend decades more.
The entire Internet's numbering system was once managed by one man with a paper notebook. When it outgrew him, the world split it into five regional registries—and created one of the most unusual governance experiments in history.
Route servers turn thousands of peering sessions into one. Looking glasses let you see the Internet through another network's eyes. Both solve problems you don't know you have—until you do.
BGP is the protocol that routes traffic between every network on the Internet—a system built on trust in an era when trust made sense, now holding together 70,000+ autonomous systems through a combination of engineering elegance and collective hope.
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