Google searches have only yielded 5th grade level examples (“the modem talks between your ISP and your home network!”) or articles I would need a degree to understand. Can anyone provide an explanation that’s somewhere in between the two? I understand the fundamentals of how the Internet works, and how LAN works regarding a router and individual devices, but I’m curious to know more about the link between those.
But all these layers exist on both sides of a modem. Really the modem is translating between a type of physical/data layer on one side (e.g. twisted pair ethernet) to a different physical/data layer on the other side (e.g. docsis)
That’s why technically, it’s a “bridge”. When DOCSIS was deployed for the consumer market, marketing continued to sell the electronics box at the point of demarcation (DEMARC) as a “modem”.