How Does a Computer Modem Work?

Video Transcript

"How modems work. Well the first thing we need to do is start with the old fashioned phone based modems that the ones that you may of heard the term 56k, that's the original phone line modems. The way these worked is you had two, you actually involves two modems. One on the sending end and the other on the receiving end. The sending modem basically uses phone tones, the same ones you hear when you use a touch-tone phone, the beeps and boops and so forth and it basically uses those to substitutes for binary 1's and 0's. The receiving modem receives those signals, translates them from the phone tones back into 1's and 0's again. So sending modem takes beeps and it takes the beeps, turns them into binary, the receiving modem demodulates them, turns them from the binary back into beeps and boops that the modem can understand then sent to the computer. All of the modems work on the same basic concept. DSL modems work pretty much the same way, they use the same type of phone line but instead of using tones like actual phone dialing, they basically you're setup to use the raw cable, the raw copper wire in your phone lines as a data cable, that's why they can transmit with much greater speed. Cable modems are pretty much the same, the coaxial cable that you get with a cable modem is pretty thick and it can transmit a lot of signals very quickly. I should also mention wireless modems work pretty much the same way that the original modems do but they transmit their signals through radio waves to a cellular tower which in turn acts as an Internet service provider and then connects you to the Internet."