Understanding Network Devices
How does hardware help us communicate so that we can?
The internet is a network of all networks, like a meganetwork. But how do I connect to it? If the internet is just cables, how do I get access to it?
One day, when I felt the mobile internet wasn’t enough, I called an Internet Service Provider (ISP), mine is Airtel. They patched an optical fibre cable from the nearest pole of the electric wires and internet wires to my home and put a router, as we call it, which supports both ethernet wire and the wireless mode on both 2.4GHz & 5GHz. And I connect to it with WiFi on my mobile device and laptop. Wi-Fi and Internet are not the same; a point to be noted.
Actually, what we call it is a router. It is something else. The device is actually a combination of other network devices packaged into one box, designed to work seamlessly without the need for a complex network of devices in the house to establish an internet connection from the city’s network. So what is it then?
The device that contains:
Optical Network Terminal (ONT): mail collector
Router: mail director at the post office
Switch: in-person delivery person; postman
Wireless Access Point (WAP): the sms system that updates you about the post status
I want this article to be the introduction to the hardware world of the internet, reaching our home or office from the city’s network, Metropolitan Area Network (MAN), from the Internet of the world, Wide Area Network (WAN), with which we create our own Local Area Network (LAN).
Optical Network Terminal (ONT)
It receives light signals and turns those signals into digital data and vice versa. That’s it. It can be seen when the technichian it establishing the connection. The device that hosts the thin wire is the ONT.
Router
It acts as a traffic controller. It directs the correct route to digital data in the LAN to the devices in the LAN and sends requests to the internet from the LAN. It works with IP Addresses.
Switch
The panel of ports for wired connection in the special box is called a switch, as it directs data as requested. It works with MAC addresses of the devices.
Wireless Access Point (WAP)
The device that creates a Wi-Fi network to connect wirelessly to the device and to the internet. The two tower-like structures are part of it and easily observable. It uses Wi-Fi communication protocols to communicate.
It’s an overview of the small network. But it is scaled horizontally with the replication of the same network to different houses and offices to create a network for the cities and vertically to create a part of the internet in the state and country.
How is the data protected in such a network? Using a firewall. The firewall, as of today, is attached with router. The basic job is to protect someone else and establish a connection in your network.
There were devices that were used before these in the past, like a hub at the place of the switch and a modem at the place of the router.
HUB vs Switch
The hub used to send data packets to all the connected devices, so it was slow and less private.
Switch is smart, only sends data packets to the requested device, hence fast and private.
Router vs Modem
A modem just connects your home's special device to the Internet Service Provider (ISP)
The router connects to the ISP as well as to the other devices in the house.
But when there are so many devices in the network, how do the big data centres process data requests and send back the data so fast without choking or congestion in the network?
Using load balancers. The data centres or the server centres have middle man, like the man who distributes the posts to different postmen for easier, faster distribution of the posts, so the load balancers distribute the traffic on the network to the servers.
That’s a glimpse into the world of the internet connection in a layer of the hardware, with the communication methods they use and how they use them. Now I can tell how the website loads up on the browser when I am connected to the internet and what goes into the hardware. Ciao!
