My house gets internet via a magical coax cable that is, I assume, connected to the rest of the world via my Internet Service Provider. This cable connects directly into my router, which links to all the devices in my home.
My question is: Where does this magic cable go?
Some followup questions: How long is the cable?
How does so much data go through a single-pin coax cable? Wouldn’t it be better if there were more pins, like in a twinax configuration?
There are also other houses in my neighborhood. Are their cables connected to mine? Can their routers see the packets sent by my router, similar to ethernet?
How has your day been?
Into the ISP’s modem on the side of your house. From there to a box along the street, and from there miles away to either another hop, or the datacenter in your local area.
Serial communication is typically much easier to manage than parallel. In parallel all existing tasks need to be completed before the next task can start.
The data is routed, and if you don’t need to send the data to you the router is not going to send it to you. The same thing applies to a switch on your local ethernet. But you only really see your traffic and any broadcasts. You don’t normally see Device A talking to Device B.