Aditya Abeysinghe Networking

We discussed about switches in a previous post and this post will explain you about routers. In this article : 1. Routers vs Switches 2. Use of routing tables 3. How data packets are transferred by a router Routers vs Switches Consider the following two networks. Fig 1 : Network at the start Suppose you want to connect the computers in the first network together, you could use a switch for that purpose. Same thing could be done with the second network. However, if you want to communicate from one of the computers in the first network with that of a second network, can you just use switches? The answer is no. This is where routers come in to play. Use of routers for such connections serves many purposes. But most importantly, routers enable you to connect to all sorts of networks like local area networks (LANs), metropolitan area networks (MANs) or even wide area networks (WANs, such as the Internet). For example, assume the first network in some part of Asi...

What is a network access point? Network access points are places which provide access to national and global networking traffic. Remember that network access point was an access method that was widely used before they were replaced by Internet Exchange Points (IXP s). Why need network access points? Think that you want to send some data to a friend who is living about 500km away from you. How would you send the data to your friend. How can you connect to the friend and vice versa? The most common method to do this is to connect to your ISP (Internet Service Provider) and send the data and on the receiving end the friend can receive the data from the same ISP or from a different ISP. If you are on one network and the friend is on another network (two different ISP s) how can you connect? That is where you need network access points. Network access points, as mentioned earlier in this blog post, are places which provide access to national and global networ...