Understanding Home Networking: Modem, Router, and Switch Setup

hi everyone and welcome back to the ultimate tech hub on today's episode we're going to talk about home networking basics we'll be discussing the relationship between the modem router and the switch for those of you who are new to home networking this episode will give you a complete understanding of home networking basics so let's get started the first thing i want to discuss is how these devices are hooked up and in what order so we're going to start with the first device and that device is your modem now there are hundreds of motives on the market but that doesn't really matter what matters is you have a modem hooked up and by that i mean you have a coax cable going into your modem from the cable company this is the most common situation a less common situation would be if you have fiber optics but that's for a different episode so what is a modem a modem is a device that transfers data that's sent to it and displays it on your computer and any information sent over the cable is an analog signal so the modem will convert the analog to digital so in simple terms your modem will connect you to the internet so where do we go after the modem well you may be asking the question can i just plug my modem into my computer well the short answer is yes you can simply run an ethernet cable from your modem to your computer but would i recommend doing that absolutely not even though most computers have software firewalls installed it really pales in comparison to the protection afforded by an inexpensive router so let's talk about the router the most common routers on the market are your wi-fi routers because wi-fi routers give you a wireless connection as well as an additional four wired connections typically so i'm not going to go into depth with routers but they are relatively inexpensive so from the back of the modem there's an ethernet jack from that jack you want to plug in the ethernet cable i recommend a cat6 cable and then plug it into your router on the back of your router you'll typically see five connections you'll see four lan connections and one wan connection plug the cable from the modem into the wan connection that's wide area network this gives your router access to the internet so now you have wireless connectivity and because the router has four lan connections local area network you could connect four computers to this router but you may be asking what if i have five computers in my house or six well then you're gonna need a switch and the question is gonna be how many extra ports do i need and this really depends on your situation i always recommend getting extra ports because it future-proofs your house i would recommend an eight-port switch either a netgear or tp-link is good and they're between twenty and thirty dollars so how to hook up the switch well from one of the lan ports on the router connect an ethernet cable i recommend a cat6 cable but you can use cat5e and run that cable to your switch you can plug that cable to any port on that switch so now if you have an eight port switch you now have seven more ports for seven more wired devices and with the three extra ports on the router that gives you a total of 10 wired devices plus you have wireless as well so everyone this is the basics for home networking this video should give you a good idea of how to set up your network well guys i want to thank you for watching and once again if you like these videos give a thumbs up and share it if you love them hit subscribe to keep this channel alive you