Stay on the LAN, or Go to the Router?

About this interactive

From the lesson: the router sits at the edge of the local area network and is its gateway to the rest of the world. Anything that needs to go out to the rest of the world is sent to the router, which looks at the destination IP address and passes the packet on toward it. So the question is where the destination is. On the same LAN (the same switch or hub, the same home Wi-Fi), devices reach each other directly and the router is not involved. Anywhere else is another network: the internet, a branch in another city, and also another LAN in the same building, such as a guest network or the next floor's network. Getting there means going through the router. Distance does not decide it; the network does. On a PC, the router it sends to is listed in ipconfig as the Default Gateway.

What you'll learn

Decide whether traffic stays on the local network or goes to the router, from where its destination is

Aligned to

Cisco CCST Networking

4.4 Explain basic routing concepts

CompTIA Network+

2.1 Explain characteristics of routing technologies.

Key terms

Router: A network device that forwards data packets between networks based on IP addresses.
Default Gateway: The router that a device uses to send traffic to destinations outside its local network.
Local Area Network: A network that connects devices within a limited geographic area such as a home, office floor, or building, where all devices share the same broadcast domain and communicate at high speeds with low latency. A router defines the boundary of a LAN by separating it from other networks.
IP Address: A numerical label assigned to each device connected to a network that uses the Internet Protocol.

Topics

Router Default Gateway Local Area Network Interactive Streak Sort

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