What’s the Difference Between Modem and Router Functions?

In the very early days of the internet the best and only option for the average person’s internet connection was through analog phone lines. Multiple devices on a home network were hardly more than a distant dream, and wireless devices usually referred to large, clunky radios.

To get through to your internet service provider, you connected your modem to an old fashioned phone line, which was designed to transmit analog signals. This was fine for voices, but computers don’t have voices (or they didn’t back then, anyway), they have binary code, and so a transformation was needed.

The earliest modems had to modulate and demodulate electrical signals — that’s actually where the word comes from, by shortening and combining “modulate” and “demodulate.”

Things have come a long way since then. Now, pretty much everything is faster, stronger, better and fully digital. There are also more options for modern modems.