Monday, July 21, 2008

Broadband Routers : An Essential Guide to Broadband Routers

By Kevin Spelling

A broadband router is a computer device that receives or forwards data packets to and from the Internet towards a destination in the process called routing. A broadband router is the essential component of the computer networking that enables any sent data to arrive at the right destination.

As an illustration, imagine that the Internet is the world and one computer is one household. Other computers connected through the Internet are households around the world. Say one household will send a letter to another household in any part of the world. The letter has an address right? And that address would determine the destination of the letter. But without one reading the address, the letter would not arrive to the right receiver. The letter also would not be able to reach the intended receiver if there is not medium. This medium would be the courier. And the courier of the computer data is the router.

A router (broadband router) is also a device that enables two or more computer to receive data packets from the Internet under one IP address at the same time. Remember that to be able to connect to the Internet, a computer must have an IP address unique from the rest of the computers. Therefore, every computer connected to the Internet has it own IP address. It is like having a fingerprint or ID as an access pass to be able to enter the web. With the presence of the router, this "fingerprint" or "ID" could be shared by two or more computer at the same time.

The presence of a router becomes essential in a network to find out hacking threats and virus attacks. Broadband routers can be used as a filter. Most of the broadband modems are not featured with in-built security features. Therefore if you use a network without router, it may welcome on-line hackers. You can get routers with built-in firewall features. It will be useful for you to have a safe and secure wired or wire-free network.

Actually, ADSL broadband is accomplished by upgrading your existing telephone line for high-speed internet services. Here ADSL modem routers work by just plugging directly into the upgraded telephone line and thus avoids the need of a separate modem. Once connected, the ADSL modem router is automatically able to share the broadband internet with all the computers in your network.

It should be taken into consideration that once a single Internet connection is divided, the connection speed is affected. But there are some broadband routers that would bring minimal slowdown to the Internet speed and the effect might not even be big. Internet speed would also depend on the type of application used in a router. While some would inflict little effect on the speed like online games, others would terribly slowdown your connection and even hinder you to use the Internet at all. Usually, offices use a more sophisticated router to redirect Internet connections to the large number of computers. These routers would give better data packeting compared to a typical router used at home that results to faster Internet speed.

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