It's the first piece of hardware inside your building that the fiber connection plugs into. Its fundamental role is to translate signals. Fiber-optic cables transmit data using pulses of light, but your internal network devices—like computers, servers, and switches—operate. When data moves across a network, it's broken down into small, manageable pieces called packets. Each packet carries a portion of the information, plus details about where it's headed. These packets move according to network protocols, or the rules that define how data is formatted, transmitted and. A fiber optic router has specific features to harness the lightning-fast speeds of fiber optic networks (Fiber-To-The-Home or FTTH) from your ISP. It connects multiple packet-switched networks or subnetworks, managing traffic by directing packets to their intended IP addresses. In this guide, we'll explore the differences. A router is a computer and networking device that forwards data packets between computer networks, including internetworks such as the global Internet.