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How Home Wi-Fi Works in Plain Words
Follow an internet signal from the provider line through the modem and router to your phone, laptop and TV, and see what each step of a home network does.
Devices and Tools
How home internet connections work and why they sometimes struggle.
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Follow an internet signal from the provider line through the modem and router to your phone, laptop and TV, and see what each step of a home network does.
Learn why wired connections are often steadier than Wi-Fi, what the cable categories mean, and when powerline adapters are a reasonable alternative.
See how typing a website name triggers a lookup chain of resolvers and name servers that finds the numeric address your device needs before a page can load.
Understand download, upload, latency and jitter results from an internet speed test, and why the same connection can show different numbers each time.
Find out how mesh Wi-Fi nodes work together to cover a large home, what wireless backhaul costs in speed, and when a single router is the better choice.
A router does several jobs at once: directing traffic, sharing one connection, handing out addresses, filtering threats and broadcasting Wi-Fi. Here is how.
Learn what an IP address is, how public and private addresses differ, and how your router and devices use them to find each other on a network.
Distance, walls, interference, congestion and old devices all slow Wi-Fi. Learn how to spot each cause and which simple fixes are worth trying first.
Compare the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6 GHz Wi-Fi bands, including range, speed, interference and device support, so you can see which suits each device at home.
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