 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here bringing you today another video about technology and networking Because this is a YouTube channel where you can learn about tech Networking M discs living in Israel Marketing and just about anything the might my point is there really isn't a sort of theme For this YouTube channel yet. So if you do want to subscribe I encourage anybody to subscribe using the default subscribe system on YouTube so that YouTube's algorithm magic Algorithm can do its work. It's magic and do some work to try to get videos in your feed for me That may be of interest to you because the amount of people who are interested in both living in Israel and M Discs is already probably just me So for today's video, I want to talk a bite what I call module network design the Inspiration if you will for this video I was I'm going on a trip soon to the United States the wonderful USA my wife is American And I was telling her the few things I ordered from Amazon Prime because everything in Israel is Generally overpriced so we use our trip to the US besides seeing in-laws To get a couple of things that are much more expensive here and cheaper there and one of the things I found was a access point from TP link that I'd be meaning to sort of put into my network for a while and my wife said well What's an access point and I said, you know, it's the thing that's only purpose is to give out Wi-Fi And she said doesn't a router do that and I said it does so I thought hey, this might be interesting as a video to explain The advantages that come from separating network components now before I go into my little diagramming software here draw.io I want to make a point about technology in general. I remember many many years ago somebody came to my high school in Ireland and he was a kind of a Innovation coach or something like that and his job was to try inspire students to consider Entrepreneurship as a career and stuff like that and he was talking about technology He made this point just as kind of off-hand point That's really stuck with me through the years and it was that technology tends towards integration So if you think about the smartphone for example and what a modern smartphone does a modern smartphone has a camera It's got a GPS system built into it It's got depending on the sensors in the exact model of smartphone. It's got a digital compass It might have a gyroscope. It's got NFC. It's got Wi-Fi. It's got Bluetooth So modern smartphones are veritable computers, but they're actually an it's an integration of different components, right? We have a camera on our smartphone and it's not just a still camera It's a video camera Now the question is is the camera on your smartphone better or worse than a standalone Camera like a DSLR mirrorless and the answer is a no-brainer Unless you have a freakishly good smartphone camera and a freakishly bad Standalone camera the camera on the phone is inferior Likewise for all the other integrated components the GPS etc and that's kind of what I'm trying to explain here with splitting up networks and why I bought an access point and It's not that you can't get those things in a less complicated fashion It's that if you were there's always a trade-off between convenience and power So if you go back to the smartphone example Why does technology tend towards integration and why do smartphones have these components because for most people It's a lot easier to just carry around a smartphone and take casual photos Than it is to bring around a camera and a smartphone However, if you're a photographer looking to get the best possible photos you will invest in a standalone camera and If you're a if you're a serious hiker and you want to go GPS device You'll buy a standalone GPS reader and so on and so forth And it's the same thing with networking that if you're a casual home user You might be just fine with the box and I'll explain what the box is briefly But if you're trying to get a really build a really really strong home network That's when a separating components tends to make sense. So was that intro out of the way Let me jump over to my screen here and show you guys Specifically what I'm talking about and moving myself over to this corner. I like the bottom right corner today Okay, so when most people think about the box and this is the Wi-Fi box I'm going to call this I'm going to use common common language here the Wi-Fi box or router, right and What this is and I don't need to show photos of a router because pretty much everyone in this age Has one of them sitting in their home. This actually contains a number of different components that used to be separated So I'm going to break down these components. It has firstly a modem and the job of a modem is to provide It's an interface between whatever internet connectivity is coming into your house And remember when you move apartment or you sign up for internet some dude from the ISP The internet company comes along and T wire something into your wall and gives you another piece of hardware And you say okay, everything's working. So what's going on there is the last mile connectivity for the internet differs I've talked about the global network of under seas cables before and it's a super fascinating subject in my opinion But that's not how internet actually gets to your home That's how internet travels around the world and then in order to get to a b c d e f People's homes and businesses etc We use a different connectivity for last mile now interestingly. We're seeing nowadays Fiber optic internet becoming more of a thing not yet here in Israel. So in an interesting sort of technological Way, we're actually seeing the technology used to carry internet globally and locally becoming very becoming very similar However, up to now the technology used to bring internet from the local exchange to your house has been a file final mile connectivity and In Israel we have surprisingly backwards internet. We have VDSL and coaxial Now VDSL is basically a modified version of something that was intended to carry phone conversation as in when people had you know physical physical phones in their house you probably remember those and Coaxial was originally if I'm not mistaken designed for carrying cable television So neither of these are actually optimized or really intended for bringing internet So that's just an FYI now because there's different types of last mile internet connectivity to get your Internet giving device to talk to that outside network. You need a modem Which can basically exchange it can speak in the language of whatever infrastructure. It's connecting to so the modem can be different types of modems we have, you know VDSL modems a DSL modems that is Asynchronous DSL and I forget what VDSL stands for we have coax and in more modern interfaces. We have I think it's SPF or Fiber basically, right so That's the modem then the second thing you have is a Ethernet router switch now the job of the of the router if you think about it It's actually very possible to wire up your own fully functional internet Just using an internet router if you go into the settings of your router And this is again call the router when it's actually really a modem router if you go into the router settings You can actually disable External internet access and what could you do if you wanted to you could plug your one computer into one LAN port the Ethernet port Those yellow ones in the back of the router you could plug in NAS as a file server into a second one And you could plug someone else's computer Into a third one and if you really wanted to do this for whatever obscure reason You could download a local chat client that only worked over the local internet and talk to the person in the other side of the Building and even set up a little internet if you wanted to now almost no one does this because the internet is and cloud storage is Where everything is stored these days, but technically it's possible So when we put these these two components together the modem and the router we guess a system that can boast trade packets exchange Information I'm trying to keep the language relatively simple external internally within the network Give each local client on the network its own address and then the modem is is Interfacing between the router as it's called nowadays and the outside internet so that people on the local network are able to actually view websites Okay, so this would be a I just need to put this up here that we have vertically flowing arrow So that's a kind of how your average Local internet network is structured these days. It's a flow chart from The router which contains multiple components through to the internet now. What about ethernet? So there's also another thing built into the Wi-Fi writer And I'll need to actually draw ours down here because I'm super pedantic about this to diagram this accurately and This the wireless writers also have an access point if you have a wireless Client like most people would use the internet nowadays let's say through a laptop in one of the old school freaks on desktop That laptop is connecting to the router Over Wi-Fi now technically I don't think it's even technically accurate to call that a built-in access point But this is just explained in a more sophisticated network diagram what a access point does now imagine you're in your average home, right? There's no reason to have the modem the internet right in the access point separated In fact, it's much more convenient for most consumers if they are all in one Box that's why I said I'd explain what box means but in let's say you're in JFK airport and you want to Set up a Wi-Fi network for the whole passengers in the terminal the hundreds of thousands of people passing through the terminal every day Do you think in JFK network? There's like a single writer sitting in someone's office that's serving, you know 10 to thousands of people the airport of course not and what happens in airports and enterprises and larger Network deployments or access points and there won't just be one access point the kind of distinctive feature of access points Is that they are very good at speaking to one another and forming into one? What looks like one network to your average user? So you're gonna have one AP and they're all kind of talking to one another to form one network So that's how big networks work now the advantage of doing this in home network your average home internet user is Going to be best served with the the box the Wi-Fi router that they get from their ISP. It's got a modem It's got a it's got a router. It's got a built-in access point. It does everything and everything comes from there However, there are situations where doing the split up the components approach actually makes sense One of the advantages here is that Internet technology tends to evolve So maybe if you have the modem built into the modem router, which most folks call a router If your internet service provider changes over from VDSL to fiber You need to get yourself a new router And that's not a concern for most people because most people with internet service contracts The ISP issues a router and you get and you know, you kind of get what they give you But if you wanted to really take control of your network by separating at the hardware You're able to just change one component at a time. So if you go tomorrow from VDSL to fiber you can swap you can upgrade your modem and then You can have your own wired router and so long as the ports are strong enough to support the faster connectivity That's no problem. You just maybe need to change a few settings But you only need to change this part of the hardware now the bigger advantage I would say actually comes in the realm of access points The problem with the the box is that the place you broadcast your wireless internet from your Wi-Fi is Collocated with where the box sits and where does the box sit and my experience living in Ireland and Israel It's typically wherever the ISP guy can connect the internet to your house. So as you because you have to have From the point you have to have a cable attached to the box and from there if you're broadcasting So that point if you think about your average home Where would be the best point or points to broadcast a Wi-Fi network from it might be very very far away from where the Box is located the box is located upstairs and an ideal situation You like to work downstairs on the kitchen table. So you'd want to have the place for that Wi-Fi networks broadcast Probably somewhere in the center of the house so that everyone gets kind of equal access or better Yes, have a couple of AP's and that's why AP's Are advantageous now this is not the same thing as mesh networking or even mesh with Ethernet back all It's slightly different and this is considered the gold standard really for home Wi-Fi networks if you can do this and to do this you really need to own your property because Unless you have a very flexible landlord They tend not to like their tenants doing stuff like drilling holes through walls in order to run even that cabling Threat the threat the house But if you're lucky enough to own your own place you could go from your router and split off a bunch of AP's they even make outdoor AP's let's call this AP for outdoor AP and outdoor AP's are weatherproof and they can you know survive You know rain and wind and stuff like that and you don't even need to get power To them if you have PoE that's power over Ethernet So this is where so I hope I hope this little Diagramming effort has explained the value in separating it the network components If my wife ever wants to sit through a 15 minute video to learn why I bought an AP it's for this reason I already have a separate Ethernet network, but for my AP currently I'm using a router in AP mode I wanted an actual standalone device that was intended to work as an AP if anything just for Physical reasons because AP's tend to they have a ceiling fixtures You can put them on your the top of your house and that's something if you get into networking what next time you're traveling through an airport You will notice you'll begin noticing AP's in the wild. You'll see them in libraries. You'll see them on airports They're typically just white boxes mounted on the wall. They're not very conspicuous But if you recognize the brands you begin to recognize what they are and that's how an Airport like O'Hare or JFK or any network any airport for that matter Runs their network. They don't broadcast from a box. That would be just impractical No one could use the internet unless they're very close to that little area So what they do instead is they separate that separate out the components Especially on the Wi-Fi front and by the way, there's nothing stopping you from using your Wi-Fi router You don't need to separate out the modem if you don't want to if you're happy with cutting down on the hardware a little bit you can have your standard ISP issued router and Just run an AP it would be better if you're doing so to disable the Wi-Fi on the router because then you're gonna risk creating conflicts You don't need a second Wi-Fi network. So just turn off the Wi-Fi on the ISP router And run it off from your AP's and there's various ones on the market from ubiquity TP link and a bunch of other providers You can find them for sure on Amazon or new egg or any of the other usual suspects Hope that video is useful if you're interested at home networking and you wonder why sometimes it's better These are the reasons I hope I made them clear Thank you guys for watching and if you'd like to get more videos from me Please subscribe to this YouTube channel using the default subscribe feature. Have a great day