#internet

You pay for a gigabit connection and video calls still glitch, pages still hang, and games still lag. The number on your bill measures bandwidth, but the thing you feel is latency, and more Mbps does almost nothing to fix it.

DNS is the internet's phonebook, but that analogy hides the interesting part: a global lookup system, distributed across millions of servers, that resolves a name in tens of milliseconds and quietly holds the whole web together.

Most home internet plans give you 10x more download than upload, and most users never wonder why. The answer is partly engineering and partly an industry decision that’s harder to undo than to maintain.