When a browser displays a web page, dozens of physical and logical systems cooperate in just a few milliseconds. Understanding how the Internet works requires looking beyond the screen: underwater cables, routing protocols, servers spread across multiple continents. The distribution of global traffic has changed in nature in recent years, and recent data shows that the majority of flows no longer even come from human users.
Global Internet Traffic Distribution: Who Really Consumes Bandwidth
| Traffic Type | Estimated Share in 2024 | Estimated Share in 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Content and cloud networks (Google, Meta, AWS, etc.) | 73% of international bandwidth | About 75% |
| Automated web traffic (bots) | 51% of total web traffic | 53% of total web traffic |
| Including malicious bots | 37% | 40% |
| HTTPS traffic with post-quantum key exchange | About 2% (March 2024) | About 52% (end of 2025) |
This data, sourced respectively from TeleGeography, Thales/Imperva reports, and Akamai, paints a picture of an Internet whose structure diverges from the image of a space where millions of individuals navigate freely. Major content and cloud providers concentrate three-quarters of international bandwidth. Automated traffic now exceeds human traffic.
To delve deeper into how the Internet works on CGI Network, it’s essential to keep these proportions in mind: they condition how protocols, routing, and physical infrastructures are sized.
Undersea Cables and the Physical Topology of the Network
The Internet relies on a mesh of fiber optic cables laid on the ocean floor. Their diameter is comparable to that of a garden hose, but their total length exceeds one million kilometers. This infrastructure ensures data transmission between continents.
Geographical Vulnerability Points
The cables converge at bottlenecks: the Strait of Malacca, the Red Sea, the Baltic Sea, approaches to Taiwan. Recent incidents, including outages in the Baltic Sea, remind us that the physical topology remains fragile.
- In the Baltic Sea, several cases of damage to undersea cables have been documented since 2023, some attributed to ship anchors, others under investigation for sabotage.
- In Cameroon, outages of terrestrial fiber optics have highlighted the dependence of some African countries on a limited number of links.
The network’s redundancy, often presented as a legacy advantage from its original military design, reaches its limits when multiple links fail simultaneously in the same area. Routing data to alternative paths works, but with a notable degradation in throughput and latency.
Communication Protocols: How Data Flows
Every device connected to the Internet uses an IP address to be identified on the network. TCP/IP protocols break data into packets, route them through different paths, and then reassemble them at the destination. This routing mechanism is at the heart of how the Internet operates.
Post-Quantum Encryption and the Evolution of HTTPS Protocols
Akamai reports that the share of human HTTPS traffic protected by a post-quantum hybrid key exchange increased from 2% to 52% between March 2024 and the end of 2025. This transition, made without most users noticing, alters the security layer of transmission protocols.
The shift to post-quantum encryption addresses a specific threat: quantum computers capable of breaking current algorithms. Browsers and servers are adopting hybrid key exchanges that combine a classical algorithm with a quantum-resistant algorithm. The transition occurs on the server and browser side, without user action.
Bots and Automated Traffic: The Hidden Side of Daily Connection
The Thales/Imperva reports indicate that 53% of web traffic in 2025 came from automated software. Among them, malicious bots accounted for 40% of total traffic, up from 37% a year earlier.
This means that one in two requests processed by a web server does not correspond to a human viewing a page. Search engine indexing bots, price scrapers, AI tools collecting training data, and attack bots (credential stuffing, DDoS) occupy an increasing share of bandwidth.
In contrast, human traffic remains predominant in certain types of services: instant messaging, video conferencing, video streaming. The distinction between automated traffic and human traffic has become a key issue in sizing computer networks and securing connected devices.
Daily Usage and Infrastructure: What Each Click Mobilizes
When a user loads a web page, their request traverses their local network (Wi-Fi or Ethernet to the ISP’s box), ascends to a regional point of presence, potentially travels through an undersea cable, reaches a server hosted in a data center, and then the reverse path brings back the response packets.
Each loaded page involves dozens of DNS, TCP, and TLS exchanges before the first byte of content appears on the screen. DNS resolution translates a domain name into an IP address. The TCP connection establishes a reliable channel. The TLS handshake encrypts the communication.
Major content providers, which account for about 75% of international bandwidth used according to TeleGeography, have deployed cache servers as close to users as possible to reduce latency. This strategy redistributes the logical topology of the network: a video viewed in Lyon is not necessarily served from an American data center, but from a point of presence located in France.
The key data that summarizes the current state of the global network is this: the majority of Internet traffic no longer comes from humans, and three-quarters of international bandwidth is consumed by a handful of cloud and content players. The physical and logical structure of the Internet is adapting to this reality, with increasingly sophisticated protocols and an undersea infrastructure whose fragility remains underestimated.
