Networking:routers

Definition: Routers are specialized computers that send your messages and those of every other Internet user speeding to their destinations along thousands of pathways.

The telephone call you make to someone on the other side of the country or region, the telephone system establishes a stable circuit between your telephone and the telephone you're calling. The circuit might involve a half dozen or more steps through copper cables, switches, fiber optics, microwaves and satellites, but those steps are established and remain constant for the duration of the call. This circuit approach means that the quality of the line between you and the person you're calling is consistent throughout the call, but a problem with any portion of the circuit maybe a tree falls across one of the lines used, or there's a power problem with a switch brings your call to an early and abrupt end. When you send an e-mail message with an attachment to the other side of the country, a very different process is used.

Internet data, whether in the form of a Web page, a downloaded file or an e-mail message, travels over a system known as a packet-switching network. In this system, the data in a message or file is broken up into packages about 1,500 bytes long. Each of these packages gets a wrapper that includes information on the sender's address, the receiver's address, the package's place in the entire message, and how the receiving computer can be sure that the package arrived intact. Each data package, called a packet, is then sent off to its destination via the best available route a route that might be taken by all the other packets in the message or by none of the other packets in the message. This might seem very complicated compared to the circuit approach used by the telephone system, but in a network designed for data there are two huge advantages to the packet-switching plan.

* The network can balance the load across various pieces of equipment on a millisecond-by-millisecond basis.
* If there is a problem with one piece of equipment in the network while a message is being transferred, packets can be routed around the problem, ensuring the delivery of the entire message.