LAB / EXPERIMENT
Packet Tracer
Trace a single packet from your phone to a web server. Watch it hop through routers, ISPs, and internet exchanges. Toggle the packet header to see what metadata each intermediary can read.
Related reading: What Is a Packet?
Press "Send Packet" to trace a packet from your phone to a web server. Watch it hop through each network node.
What This Shows
Every time you load a webpage, your request is broken into packets — small chunks of data that each find their own path through the network. This experiment traces a single packet through a simplified network topology.
Notice the packet header: even when the payload (your actual data) is encrypted via HTTPS, the header — containing your IP address, the destination, and the protocol — is visible to every node along the path. Your ISP, the internet exchange, the CDN — they all see where your packets are going.
The TTL (Time to Live) decrements at each hop. If it reaches zero, the packet is discarded — a safety mechanism preventing lost packets from circling the network forever.