Understanding your home Network

I wanted to start a mini series of different articles talking about how daily technologies work. The first one being WiFi routers!

Let’s face it every single day we all use WiFi. We scroll on Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram. We game on our PCs, Xbox’s or PS5’s. We stream on Netflix and every other streaming service we may or may not use. Sometimes theses things lags and it can be frustrating, so frustrating that you lose your mind. But have you ever wondered why this happens and what really goes behind the scenes.

I’d like to say there’s really 5 main steps and I am going to explain them as simple as possible.

First Step: Internet connection in your house. The internet connected us through routers which we all have, it’s the big black or white box. They are provided to us by our ISP (Internet Service Provider) think of companies like AT&T and Xfinity some of the biggest in the country. They install cables from their network into our home, those cables are than connected to a modem. The modem translates signals from the ISP to our home.

Second Step: The router does the heavy work next. The modem than passes the internet connection to the router. Essentially the router manages all the traffic going in and out of your home network. Taking incoming data, deciding where it should go, and sending it to the correct device. If you use YouTube on your laptop and instagram on your phone. The router keeps those data stream organized.

Third Step: Data will always be in a static state, digital information just one and zeros. The router converts digital data into radio waves. Wowzerz I know you didn’t know that. Most routers are either 2.5 GHz or 5GHz, the antennas on the router is able to transmit these radio waves into the air.

Fourth Step: Devices intercept these signals. All of our evinces have wireless network adapters installed into them. These adapters detect radio waves, converts it back to digital data, and sends responses back to the router. Communication between the router and device is two way. Send a request, router forwarded it to the ISP, Website responds and router sends it back to your device. All this happens in the blink of an eye, in milliseconds.

Fifth Step: Devices using signal at the same time. Your router does a lot it like assigns IP address and uses NAT (Network Address Translation) to each device I’ll talk about these in depth in a later articles. To keep it short however, NAT allows for multiple devices on a network to share one public IP address. Router essentially keeps all the traffic organized.

There you go! Honestly it may sound a bit confusing still but I tried to explain in a way where it’s not too technical and deep. However if you would like me to do that let me know in the comments :)