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More recently, mesh network kits have become common for larger homes with lots of dead spots, since they allow multiple units to blanket your house in Wi-Fi more effectively than range extenders. Most home users have routers with wireless access points built in, but standalone access points are still common for businesses, since you can pair multiple access points together to extend your network over a large area. To do that, you need something to broadcast that wireless signal.Ī wireless access point connects to your router, usually over Ethernet, and communicates with your Ethernet-less devices over wireless frequencies. Today, though, we have the ability to connect all those devices to your home network (and thus, the internet) over Wi-Fi. Once upon a time, all computers connected to the internet through a jumble of wires. That's where the next piece of equipment comes in.Īn Access Point Adds Wireless Connectivity Not all routers include Wi-Fi-some merely connect computers with Ethernet cables. In most home cases, your WAN is, for all intents and purposes, the internet. The network created by your router is known as a local area network, or LAN, and it connects you to a larger wide area network, or WAN. (That way, your phone doesn't receive the cat videos you asked for on your laptop.)

Your modem receives information from the internet, sends it to the router, and the router sends it to the computer that asked for it. If your modem's IP address is like the street address of a building, your router's internal IP addresses are like apartment numbers. That router gives each device its own internal IP address, which it uses to route traffic between them. A router connects all your home's devices to each other-through Ethernet cables or Wi-Fi-and then connects to the modem. They usually only have one Ethernet port, and only produce one IP address, which identifies your location to the internet (kind of like your street address does in the real world).

Standalone modems aren't able to send data to multiple devices simultaneously. But most people have more than one computer in their house, not to mention smartphones, tablets, e-readers, and a host of other devices. That doesn't mean that you need two separate devices, though. If you only had one computer in your house, you could plug it straight into the modem with an Ethernet cable and call it a day-you'd be connected to the internet and watching cat videos instantly. A wireless home network needs a connection to the web (the modem) and wireless access to that connection for your devices (the router).
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