The Network · Workshop 04 · Practice
What a Router Actually Does
Five steps. About 25 minutes. Up to 7 stars. The constellation you're building is called First Hop.
The Network · Workshop 04 · Practice
Five steps. About 25 minutes. Up to 7 stars. The constellation you're building is called First Hop.
A router is a tiny computer with one job: read the address on a packet, look up a table, decide which wire to send it down next. Your data does this 12 to 20 times before it gets where it's going.
When you load a website, your packet doesn't go straight to the website. It goes to your home router. Your home router sends it to your internet provider's router. That router sends it to a bigger router. That router sends it across a continent. Eventually it lands on the website's server.
Each router runs the same loop: read the destination, check the routing table, pick the next hop, send it on. If the router doesn't know how to reach the destination, it sends the packet to its default gateway — basically, "someone above me will know."
By the end of this workshop you'll have walked through one packet's journey across the internet and named what each router did.
That's the warm-up. When you've actually read it — not skimmed — tap below.
Pick all that fit.
Click an action, then when it happens.
Pretend you're sending a message from your phone to a friend across the country. Write the journey in 6 hops — what router each step, what each does.
Stuck? Hop 1: my phone WiFi to my home router. Hop 2: home router via Ethernet to the cable modem. Hop 3: cable modem to the internet provider's regional router. Hop 4: regional to long-haul backbone router. Hop 5: backbone to friend's provider. Hop 6: friend's provider to friend's home router to friend's phone.
One sentence.