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.