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.
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.
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.
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, you can find 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. For more details, please visit our site.
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