Internet & Telecommunications: How the World Connects
How information travels, who owns the networks that carry it, and who controls them, as of October 2026: the internet's layers and its history from the telegraph to the smartphone; packets, addresses, routing, and encryption; the fiber backbone, the exchanges where networks meet, and who pays whom; the submarine cables that carry nearly all traffic between continents, and the cuts in the Red Sea and the Baltic; broadband at home and what it costs; mobile networks, the airwaves, and the auctions that sell them; Starlink and its rivals; the cloud, its data centers, and the outages and drone strikes of 2025-26; the 2.2 billion people still offline; who governs the internet; and the hacks, record shutdowns, and national walls that threaten it. Where the field argues, each side's case comes before the course's reading. Worked examples include a household's month of data, the half-second before a web page appears, a broadband bill, and a video call from New York to London. Opens with a table of key numbers, a Who's Who, and a list of terms.