Internet Router

The real name for what most people call an Internet router is a residential gateway. It is a splitter or switch. The line from the Internet Service Provider (ISP) plugs into the Internet router at a point usually called 'Line' or 'Line In' then the computer or computers plug into the other sockets.

Internet Router

This allows you to share the line with several household computers via the Internet router. The Internet router also allows you to network your home computers.

Despite the common use of the phrase 'Internet routers' for home computer use, Internet routers are really, or at least originally were, designed for the workplace. Internet routers are really specialized computers that interconnect computers on a network and also interconnect different networks.

For example, if computer A wants to send a message to computer B, computer A sends the message to the nearest router; that router looks up the location of computer B and sends the message to the nearest router, if there is one, and then it s passed to computer B.

This process can take place in a room, in a building or from one side of the world to the other. Therefore, an office building with departments on different floors may have a router on each floor which are connected to a main, central router and that router is usually also connected to the outside world or 'wide area network' and or the Internet.

The incredible thing is that a message can be typed at a desk in one country, pass through a dozen routers and land at the right desk on the other side of the world in a second or two.

So why do we call residential gateways, the devices that we use at home, Internet routers? Well, our home systems are becoming more and more sophisticated every year and nowadays many home set-ups resemble an office. Some of them are probably more sophisticated than most office set-ups of ten years ago.

Firstly, it is not uncommon for there to be two, three or even four computers in a house, especially in a house with teenage children; secondly, these computers will be accessing the Internet; thirdly, they will be accessing the Internet from one ISP, one incoming line and fourthly, all the computers will be interconnected.

In this case the residential gateway is performing the same tasks as an office Internet router. This is why the terminology is becoming blurred. The home computer environment more resembles a small office-home office (SOHO) situation than ever before.

And don't forget people's obsession with sending instant messages, how do you think that they get to the intended recipient so quickly without mistakes? Internet routers, of course!

Internet routers in homes and offices pick up your 'instant message' and route it to the service provider; once it gets to Yahoo or MSM, their routers send it out to the correct recipient; when it arrives in the recipient's building, the router there decides where to send it.

If all the computers in a household are linked via a router, you have a 'local area network' (LAN), which means that you will be able to send messages and access all the data on all the computers within the house without going on the Internet, because your Internet router will handle the traffic internally itself.