this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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Router is a technical term, that many people misuse due to retail advertising.
A router by itself has multiple networks that talks to, and decides what traffic goes to which network.
A switch has one network, but it's aware of what device is attached to which port, and only forwards packets to the correct port for the device.
The difference between a router and a switch is what level of the network stack they're working at. But basically switches are dumb and fast, routers are smarter and slower. A fast router tends to be expensive.
Wireless access points typically don't want to send all of the wired network traffic over the wireless, if it's not addressed to a wireless client, so it'll keep track of the hardware address of the clients, and if it sees traffic destined for that hardware then and only then will it switch the packet onto the wireless network. Hence all access points tend to act as a hardware switch.
Let's say you have a 10 room concrete building. Let's say the concrete has rebar in it, so basically a wireless signal can't go between rooms. This is theoretical, just go with me.
If you wanted to have seamless wireless access across the entire house, so that you could take a voice call and walk around. You would need to put a wireless access point in each room.
In order to allow seamless transfer between access points, you would probably want to have access points from the same vendor, all configured using the same network ID, using the same authentication scheme. That way your smarter clients like modern cell phones, would see that oh there's multiple wireless access points in this network that I can talk to right now, I'll switch from one to the other. When the switch happens you tend to lose some packets, so the faster the switch, the more seamless the experiences for people.
Some wireless access points can negotiate with each other to push specific clients to different access points. But most of this fast switching is done client side.
so in this 10-room building, you're going to have 10 access points, you're going to have a single router between the building and the internet, you're going to have a DHCP server internally usually. Those access points may be negotiating between themselves, using some mesh technology, but ideally they're all wired to the same network.
When a client switches from access point a to access point b, those access points will now know that physical hardware address has switched, and the main network should still send the packets to the client with very few being dropped.