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  • We use almost this same house analogy where I work to teach networking basics to some of our students that don't quite get how routing works. Works every time.
    – Sarge
    Commented Aug 21, 2014 at 22:32
  • so in a packet sent on the internet, does the router encapsulate the internal ip address (or another internal id) ?
    – Thomas
    Commented Aug 22, 2014 at 7:30
  • @Sarge I've never heard the analogy before. What differences are there between my version and what you use for students? I might nab better parts from your version for future use.
    – Taejang
    Commented Aug 22, 2014 at 14:15
  • @Thomas Routers almost always use the internal IP address inside a network. That said, routers can be configured to use MAC addresses, names that correspond to a DNS list stored on a server, or even other ids manually stored in the router's config. Such methods are just about exclusive to businesses, universities, and other large networks. Routers can also be configured to route things to other routers to divide the work in large networks; this is usually done with router IP addresses (which are internal).
    – Taejang
    Commented Aug 22, 2014 at 14:24
  • 1
    @Dan, where you use house, we sometimes use apartment building, office building or even show the progression of mailing a letter from one state to another and how it moves through the US Postal System.
    – Sarge
    Commented Aug 22, 2014 at 23:40