Modem And Router in Home Network

To build a home network, you have to prepare ethernet cable, modem and router. Among them, modem and router are regarded as core components in home network building. Both of them are small plastic or metal box-shaped electronic devices, but they serve two different purposes. How much do you know about them? To carry out the home network building smoothly, it is necessary to learn as much as possible about modem and router. This article will introduce modem and router to you.

Modem

The word "modem" is a contraction of the word modulator-demodulator. A modem is a device that provides access to the Internet. Generally, a modem has one LAN port and one service-related port (LINE port), such as a telephone port (DSL modems) or a coaxial port (cable modems), which typically provides either cable or DSL Internet service. DSL modems have a telephone connector, also called an RJ-11 jack, which connects to a telephone socket on the wall. Cable modems have a coaxial (or "coax") connection, which is the same type of connector found on a TV or cable box. This connects to a cable port on the wall. As for LAN port, it is used to connect to a router's WAN port, or to an Ethernet-ready device, such as a computer. The following figure shows the appearance of modem.

Router

If you have just a modem, you'll be able to connect just one Ethernet-ready device, such as a computer, to the internet. To allow more than one device to join the same network, you will need a router. On the front or back of the router, there are several physical ports, one WAN port, four LAN ports and one power input port. Also, there are some LED lights to display device status. For WAN port, it is connected to the LAN port on a modem via an ethernet cable; while for LAN port, it is connected to the rj45 port on Ethernet-ready device via ethernet cable.

Similarities And Differences Between Modem And Router

From the above content, it is not difficult to find that modem and router not only have differences, but also have similarities. This part will make a summary.

Similarities

• Both modem and router are small plastic or metal box-shaped electronic devices.
• Both modem and router have LAN port and power input port.
• The LAN port on both modem and router are rj45 port. And they use rj45 cable to achieve connection.

Differences

• Router has WAN port while modem has service-related port.
• The LAN port on router is connected to the rj45 port on Ethernet-ready device, while the LAN port on modem is connected the router’s WAN port or to an Ethernet-ready device.
• The modem is connected to other device via rj45 cable (LAN port) and rj11 cable (service-related port), while the router is connected to other device only via rj45 cable (WAN port and LAN port).

Modem And Router in Home Network

By connecting your modem to your router (instead of directly to a computer), all devices connected to the router can access the modem, and therefore, the Internet. The router provides a local IP address to each connected device, but they will all have the same external IP address, which is assigned by your ISP. Here is a figure for you to have a better understanding of modem and router in home network.

Conclusion

Modem and router are two of the most common components in home network. Though the two devices may look similar, they each serve a difference purpose. I hope this article can make the functions of the two devices easier to understand. FS.COM can provide high quality rj45 cable for home network building and there are different types, such as shielded cat5e cable, cat6 utp cable, Cat7 patch cable and so on. 

Know More About Router for Computer Networks

It is undeniable that the Internet narrows the distance between each other, making the world smaller. Benefiting from high speed information network, we are able to know what’s happening around the world without going out, as long as you have a computer which can get access to the Internet. How can your computer get access to the Internet? Just plug one end of Ethernet cable into the network port. But where is the other end of Ethernet cable plugged into? The answer is router, which is the topic of this article. Keeping reading, and you will know more about it.

Overview of Router

From the external appearance, router is a small plastic or metal box-shaped electronic device. It features a number of physical ports on the front or back of the unit, such as WAN (wide area network) port, LAN (local area network) port and power input port. Also, there are some LED lights to display device status. As the WAN port and LAN port are rj45 interface, they are often connected with ri45 patch cable, such as cat5e ethernet cable, cat6 ethernet cable, Cat7 ethernet cable. Traditional routers are designed to join together multiple local area networks (LANs) with a wide area network (WAN), so there are four LAN ports (LAN1-4) and one WAN port on router. In addition, the WAN port is connected with modem or switch while the LAN port is connected with computer. To have a better understanding of router’s outer structure, Here is figure for you.

Working Principle of Router

In technical terms, a router is a Layer 3 network gateway device, meaning that it connects two or more networks and that the router operates at the network layer of the OSI model. Routers contain a processor (CPU), several kinds of digital memory, and input-output (I/O) interfaces. They function as special-purpose computers, one that does not require a keyboard or display. The router's memory stores an embedded operating system (O/S). Compared to general-purpose OS products like Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS, router operating systems limit what kind of applications can be run on them and also need much smaller amounts of storage space. Examples of popular router operating systems include Cisco Internetwork Operating System (IOS) and DD-WRT. These operating systems are manufactured into a binary firmware image and are commonly called router firmware. By maintaining configuration information in a part of memory called the routing table, routers also can filter both incoming or outgoing traffic based on the addresses of senders and receivers. In simple terms, router serves as intermediate destinations for network traffic. It receives incoming network packets, looks inside each packet to identify the source and target network addresses, then forwards these packets where needed to ensure the data reaches its final destination.

Conclusion

In our daily life, router can be seen everywhere. In fact, there are different kinds of routers for specific applications, such as home broadband router for home network, edge router for an ISP network, subscriber edge router for subscriber's network and so on. Learning about some basic knowledge about router helps to understand different functions of different router and this will save time on solving problem especially when we come across the situation where router break down. Here I recommend two of the top router seller: TP-LINK and NETGEAR. Though FS.COM does not provide router, they have high quality ethernet cable here at low price, such as 1m cat5e ethernet cable is US$ 0.91, 1m cat6 ethernet cable is US$ 1.00 and 1m Cat7 ethernet cable is US$ 12.00.