If you’ve been brought up in the 21st century then you probably take a lot of things for granted that 30 years ago people just didn’t have. One of those things is the Internet and its ability to be able to connect people from all over the world and allow them to interact with each other in a variety of ways including sending email, visiting web sites, joining forums, attending online chats and countless other things. But none of this would be possible if it weren’t for a device that most people have never seen and probably don’t even know exist, called a router.
Routers are pieces of equipment that send messages from everyone connected to the network along thousands of different pathways. We’re going to take a behind the scenes look at exactly how these routers work.
Let’s say you’re sending an email to a friend of yours who is living across country or even in another part of the world. How does the email know to end up on your friend’s computer instead of all the other millions of computers all over the world? A good part of the work to get these messages from one computer to another is handled by routers. ...