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Welcome to the Technology Translator. I'm Vic. Every episode we break down technology, cybersecurity, and AI into plain English for Australian business leaders. Welcome to the podcast. Hello and welcome back to the Technology Translator, the podcast where we make technology make sense. Today's episode is one I've actually been looking forward to recording because believe it or not, this is something I had to spend a fair amount of time getting my own head around. If you came to my house and looked at my internet setup, you'd see modem, a couple of routers, little random white boxes throughout the house, a couple of Wi-Fi access points. For years I knew what they did, sort of, but I really couldn't explain why they all existed. Then I started thinking, if someone who's worked in technology for over ten years still had to stop and think about networking, then surely business owners shouldn't feel bad for finding it confusing either. So today let's strip away all the jargon. Forget switches, forget routers, forget IP addresses for a moment. Instead, let's answer one simple question. What actually happens when you press send on an email? So imagine you're sitting in your office. You send an email to someone in Sydney, or maybe you save a document into SharePoint. Perhaps you're even uploading a photo from your phone. Every one of those things is simply communication, and that's really what networking is. It's communication. Technology just has a fancy way of saying it. A network is simply two or more devices that can communicate with each other, and that's it. It's not the internet, we're not talking about Wi-Fi, it's just communication. Your office has a network, your home has a network. Even your smart TV and your phone are actually talking to each other. The network is simply the language that they all use to have that conversation. So I always like to find analogies to make technology easier to understand. So let's imagine that your business is a city. The people living in that city are your devices, your laptop, your phone, your printer, your meeting room screen, security cameras, even sadly, your coffee machine these days. But every single one of those things wants to send and receive information. But people can't communicate if there are no roads. And that's exactly what your network is, the road system. Some roads have bitumen, some are just dirt, some may be highways. And technology has the exact same thing. You have wired roads and wireless roads. So let's start with two of the most common ways devices communicate Ethernet and Wi-Fi. Ethernet is simply a cable. Think of it as a sealed highway. It's that big port that you're able to shove that thing into. It's reliable, it's fast, it's predictable. Wi-Fi is the same journey, just without the cable. It's still the same network. It just traveling down through radio waves instead. And here's the one thing people often don't realize. Wi-Fi itself isn't the internet. If your Wi-Fi stops working and your phone suddenly starts working on 5G, the internet itself wasn't broken. The wireless connection inside your house was. They're completely different things. So let's explain the mysterious collection of blinking boxes that seem to multiply every time someone upgrades your internet. And let's start with the easiest one, an access point. This is probably one of those fancy little white discs on the ceiling in an office, or one of those extra Wi-Fi units you've probably got around the house. Its only job is to broadcast the Wi-Fi. It doesn't create the internet, it doesn't make your internet any faster, it simply lets wireless devices join your existing network. And now let's imagine you have lots of devices that use cables instead. Computers, printers, servers. That's where a switch comes in. Think of it like a powerboard. Except instead of giving you extra power sockets, it gives you extra network sockets. Now eventually your business will want to talk to another network. It might be Microsoft, it might be Google, might actually be another office. That's the router's job. The router decides where traffic should go. So like a GPS for your data. And then finally, there's the modem. The modem is a translator between your home office and your internet provider. Now, here's where a lot of people do get confused, myself included. Many modem internet boxes actually combine the modem, router, and Wi-Fi into the one device, which is why most people simply call that whole thing the modem. But technically it is doing several jobs at once. So let's also take a step back and talk about what actually is the internet. This one surprised me when I first started to understand it. The internet definitely is not one giant computer, it's not some magical place, despite feeling like that sometimes. Then the internet is literally a network of networks. Your home network, my home network, Microsoft's, Google's, every university, every bank, every business, they're all individual networks just connected together. And that's why it's called the Internet. Networks connected together. So let's imagine trying to send a parcel without an address. It'd never arrive. Computers have the same problem. Every device has an address, it's called an IP address, and that's how information knows where it's going. Thankfully, we don't have to remember them. Imagine instead of typing google.com, you had to remember a string of numbers every single time. That's where this thing called DNS comes in. DNS is basically your contacts list. You remember mum. Your phone remembers the number. You remember google.com, DNS remembers the actual address. So one question that you do find every now and then is why does my internet just feel slow? And this is another one that people get mixed up all the time. You often will say my internet feels slow, or you'll hear people say that same thing. But there is actually a few different reasons why that can actually happen. The first is bandwidth. Think of a highway. If you've only got two lanes, only so many cars can travel at once. Add eight lanes, and suddenly a lot more traffic gets through. That's bandwidth. It's like the uh Bruce Highway on a Friday afternoon heading either north or south of Brisbane. The second is latency. Latency is how long it takes for the first car to reach its actual destination. You can have a huge highway, but if it's 500 kilometers long, you're still waiting. And that's why gamers actually obsess over latency and why video calls feel awkward if latency is high, even when your internet speed looks fantastic. Now, let's solve one mystery that completely confused me growing up: land parties. Why were they such a massive thing? Personally, I used to have relatives who uh used to go sit in uh shared community spaces and they'd hook up a whole bunch of computers and they'd have all night uh gaming sessions. And I never understood why they're actually such a massive thing. So a LAN simply stands for local area network. Back in the 90s, early 2000s, home internet was slow, really slow. So instead of playing over the internet, people literally carried their desktop computers to a friend's house or a community space, plugged them all into the same local network with Ethernet cables, and played together. No internet was required, just one local network. So now you know what LAN means, and a LAN party suddenly makes perfect sense. So hopefully networking now feels a little less mysterious. At the end of the day, networking isn't about routers, switches, or blinking lights. It's all about communication. Every email, every Teams meeting, every cloud application, every website, every AI tool, every file you save. It relies on networks quietly doing their job in the background. As a business leader, this is something you want to be able to understand because if you do have multiple office locations, you need to be able to understand why you'd want to have local area networks and local networks within your building, and maybe even something that connects one office to another. It means that you can communicate securely between those uh locations without actually having to go on the internet. It is definitely something that's worth investing in, and uh if you now that you should know a few more of the basics, will hopefully make your uh a little bit more sense when people come to you for the next uh invoice. Next week we're going to build on something from today's episode, talking about one of the most misunderstood pieces of technology in any business, the firewall. Because now that we know how information travels, the next question is who actually is allowed through that gate? Thank you for listening to the Technology Translator. If you found this episode useful, share it with someone who's ever looked at a blinking internet box and wondered what on earth it actually does. Until next week, keep asking questions and keep making technology make sense. Thanks for joining the episode. If you do want to follow me on Instagram at all, you can find me under the Technology Translator. If you would like to email me, Vic at the Technology Translator.au And I guess I wouldn't be doing this properly if I didn't say if you like what you hear, hit the follow button. There will be more of these episodes coming up.