Home Networking

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A community to help people learn, install, set up or troubleshoot their home network equipment and solutions.

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How the f*ck does a modem work? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by EgoPoweredDreams@alien.top to c/homenetworking@selfhosted.forum

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Google searches have only yielded 5th grade level examples (“the modem talks between your ISP and your home network!”) or articles I would need a degree to understand. Can anyone provide an explanation that’s somewhere in between the two? I understand the fundamentals of how the Internet works, and how LAN works regarding a router and individual devices, but I’m curious to know more about the link between those.

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[–] Glaborage@alien.top 3 points 11 months ago

I'll give it a shot.

In the past, before the internet existed, homes were connected to the national phone system. The national phone system is a bunch of interconnected electric lines that are designed to transport electricity in the frequencies used for speech / sound.

When internet became a thing, people needed electric lines to transport data from their internet providers to their home. Instead of building new electric lines, which would be very expensive, tech companies created a technique called "modem".

A modem transforms computer data into sound data, which can travel through phone lines. Once the sound data reaches the internet provider, another modem turns it back into computer data.