Infrastructure Behind Every Click

A few systems work together every time you go online:

• A Google search travels to a data center potentially thousands of miles away and returns in under 200 milliseconds
• A video call encodes your video into packets, routes them across continents, and decodes them — 30 to 60 times per second
• Peering lets two networks swap traffic directly for free, while transit means paying a larger network to reach the rest of the internet
• Content Delivery Networks cache popular content on servers near you, shrinking the distance data must travel