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.
Yeah man I got you. Go to your local community college and take a course on IP networking. Then if you want to go deeper take some courses on physics and RF.
But yeah… a modem is a modulator demodulator. It modulates an IP stream into RF over whatever medium the modem is made for (Coax, fiber, copper, satellite, etc.). And back. The rest is just IP networking.