What is the router?

Watch the video on TikTok @surethingnet

I've had a lot of questions about home WiFi and the one I want to focus on in this video is the router.

So you’re on your phone connected to wifi in your home (your house or your apartment) and there’s a piece of network hardware somewhere nearby like in a closet or behind the tv called the router. Your phone is connected to that router wirelessly.

There could be a repeater or range extender in between your phone and the router, but there has to be a router for you to get internet over wifi.

What does it look like? There are few styles. Aesthetic smooth white ones that look like a fancy air freshener, aggressively gaming branded ones that look like a robot spider, and the average ones that look like a boring rectangle. Sometimes your router is provided by your internet service provider like Comcast, Xfinity, Spectrum, which ever company is in your area. That router/modem combo is a topic for another video so i’m going to stick to the average home router that’s separate from the modem your service provider rents to you.

The router is like the post office. ok, hear me out. Your phone, or laptop, or Switch, or whatever device is using wifi, wants to connect to the internet so it needs some way to send messages out to the other computers on the internet. this is where the router comes in. your phone sends messages to the router and it routes them to other computers.

When you get messages back, like this video being streamed to your phone from the internet, your phone needs an address. like how you get mail at your home. the router gives you an address. so like the post office takes your mail and routes it to other post offices somewhere in the world, the router does the same thing. every device connected to the internet has an address and a router.

When you have a bunch of different devices in your network they are all connected to your router. it can handle hundreds of devices at the same time. when you go to an office building or a mall or train station where there are thousands of phones all connecting to public wifi, there are more powerful professional grade routers handling the messages. but in your home there’s usually only one for all your devices.