Default Gateway#

In almost every case, the very first address inside of a subnet is used for and held by the default gateway - which is usually a router. In our example the routers would likely be 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.2.1.

That means that when we try to talk to 192.168.2.30/24, the data is sent to 192.168.1.1, which in turn then routes it to 192.168.2.1 (unless that same router is also in charge of the network, then it just routes the traffic directly to 192.168.2.30.)

This is how hosts on two different networks can talk to each other.