About this project

Following a request around the world

When you open a website, something physical happens: a signal leaves your device, crosses radio, glass and ocean, and arrives at a machine in a building somewhere else on Earth. This site turns that invisible journey into something you can watch, one step at a time, on a globe.

  • Built to explain

    An educational visualisation, not a network diagnostic tool. Every step is there to teach something.

  • Real infrastructure

    Real orbits, cable landings, data centres and coverage — from published, openly licensed datasets.

  • Honestly simplified

    Routes are plausible reconstructions. Nothing here is a live capture of a real packet.

What you are looking at

You choose two points — where a request starts, and the data centre it is heading for — and the globe builds a route between them. Scrolling moves the request one hop at a time, and each hop explains the piece of infrastructure it is passing through: the tower that picks up your phone's radio signal, the fibre that carries it inland, the exchange points where separate networks hand traffic to each other, the submarine cables that cross oceans, and the data centre at the far end. A second path, in blue, traces the reply coming back.

With Starlink switched on the route takes a different shape. The request climbs to a satellite in low Earth orbit, may hop between satellites, and comes back down at a ground station before rejoining the ordinary terrestrial network — which is the part people are usually most surprised by.

Where the data comes from

Bundled with the site rather than fetched live, so it renders the same way every time.

  • Satellites

    Orbital elements from CelesTrak's public catalogue, propagated in the browser. The snapshot date and satellite count are shown on the globe page.

  • Coastlines and cities

    Natural Earth land, populated places and named places — public domain.

  • Submarine cables

    TeleGeography's public submarine cable map dataset.

  • Data centres

    Sites tagged telecom=data_center in OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL.

  • Mobile coverage

    A rasterised OpenCelliD snapshot published by the World Bank, sampled so populated regions everywhere are represented rather than only dense city centres.

  • Starlink

    SpaceX's published availability information and ground station locations.

What it is not

An educational representation, not a measurement. The route you see is not the exact path a specific request took.

  • Routes are plausible, not observed

    They are built from real infrastructure, but a real request is decided hop by hop by routing protocols, and may take a different path each time.

  • Hops are summarised

    A real traceroute crosses many more routers than the handful of stages shown. The stages stand for the major changes in the kind of infrastructure being used.

  • Satellite motion is sped up

    Orbits run at roughly ten times real time so the movement is visible, using a simplified orbital model rather than a full-precision one.

  • Coverage is modelled

    A green marker means the simplified model treats that area as connected. It is not a guarantee that a particular network reaches a particular address.

Why visualise it

The internet is usually described in metaphors — the cloud, the web, a series of tubes — that quietly suggest it has no location. It does. Latency is distance. An ocean is a delay. A request from a remote town travels differently from one sent in a capital city, and the reason is physical infrastructure that mostly exists in places nobody thinks about.

Seeing a request move across a globe makes those relationships concrete in a way a diagram does not: why distant servers feel slower, why undersea cables matter, what a satellite link actually buys you, and what a traceroute is really telling you when it prints a list of names.

Ready to send one?

Back to the globe →