How does the internet get to my house?
Tap a video and it plays in a second. But the video isn’t inside your tablet. It came from a computer that might be on the other side of the world.
The internet is not one thing in one place. It is a giant network of networks: millions of computers and cables all over the world, agreeing to speak the same language. Your home Wi-Fi is one tiny network. Your school has another. Video companies own huge buildings full of computers called data centers. The internet is what links them all together.
When you press play, your device sends a request to the data center where the video lives. The data center answers, but it doesn’t send the video in one piece. It cuts it up first.
How it works, in 3 steps
1. Your video is chopped into small addressed packets. Each packet carries a small piece of the video plus the address of your device and the address it came from, a bit like a letter with a to and from on the envelope.
2. Routers pass the packets along, stop by stop. A router is a machine that reads a packet’s address and sends it on toward the next router that is closer to you. A packet may hop through a dozen routers in a fraction of a second. Most of the trip is through fiber-optic cables, thin glass strands that carry information as flashes of light.
3. Your device puts the packets back together. The packets can arrive out of order, and some go missing and get sent again. Your device sorts them back into the right order, and the video plays.
If the video lives on another continent, its packets cross the ocean in cables laid on the seafloor. Many of these deep-sea cables are only about as thick as a garden hose, yet they carry over 95 percent of all the data that travels between countries. The last stretch, from the street to your house, might be fiber or an older cable line, ending at your home router, which beams it to your device over Wi-Fi.
Myth or fact?
“Internet data crosses oceans mostly by satellite.” Myth. Over 95 percent of international data travels through cables on the seafloor. They are faster and carry far more than satellites.
“The internet and the World Wide Web are the same.” Myth. The internet is the network of cables and computers. The web, all the websites, is one service that runs on it, alongside video calls, games and email.
“The whole internet lives inside one giant computer.” Myth. There is no center. The internet is a huge number of computers and networks linked all around the world, which is why it keeps working even when parts of it break.
- Draw a simple picture on a sheet of paper and cut it into 6 pieces. Number each piece on the back and write “to: kitchen” on it.
- Hand the pieces, in a shuffled pile, to a “router” (a sibling or grown-up) in the next room. Their only job is to read the address and pass each piece toward the kitchen. Add a second router if you have one.
- In the kitchen, the receiver puts the pieces back in number order and sees the picture.
You just sent a picture the way the internet does: cut into addressed pieces, passed hand to hand by routers that only read the address, and reassembled at the end. Now imagine that happening thousands of times a second.
Sources
Every fact in this article was checked against these sources, which are also listed at the back of the book:
NOAA: Submarine cables
Stanford University: How does the Internet work?
Britannica: World Wide Web
TeleGeography: Submarine cable FAQs
100,000 Whys for Curious Kids
This question is one of 100 in 100,000 Whys for Curious Kids by Daniel Why. Full-color illustrated encyclopedia, ages 6–13, every answer checked against real sources. A labeled diagram, three steps and three myths busted for every big question. Launching on Amazon in October 2026.
See it on AmazonFree Myth or Fact printable packMore big questions: see all the questions kids ask. Have a little one at home? The toddler and preschool edition is coming this fall.