Tagged #networking

Ask most people what the box with the blinking lights does and they'll say "it's the internet." Fair. But that box is usually doing three or four separate jobs, and once you know which is which, a lot of home network problems (and shopping decisions) start making sense. The modem talks to your ISP Your internet provider delivers service over some kind of line: coaxial cable, a phone line for DSL, fiber, or a cellular signal. The modem's job is to translate whatever comes in on that line into regular Ethernet that a computer understands. That's all it does. It doesn't hand out addresses to…

Light in a fiber cable is fast, but it isn't instant. If a website lives on one server in Virginia and you're loading it from Sydney, every request has to cross an ocean and come back. A modern page might need dozens of files (images, scripts, fonts, stylesheets), and all those round trips add up to a page that feels sluggish even on a great connection. You can't make the planet smaller. What you can do is move the files closer to the people asking for them. That's what a CDN is. Content delivery network. It's a company that runs a lot of servers in a lot of cities (they call them edge…