All language subtitles for 3_Networking Hardware

Now that we understand what networks are.

Let's talk about how they're connected.

There are a lot of ways you can
connect computers to a network,

we'll only cover a few of
the major ones in this course.

First, there's an ethernet cable which
lets you physically connect to the network

through a cable.

On the back of the desktop we
worked in the previous lessons,

there's a network ports that you
plug your ethernet cable into.

Another way to connect to
a network is through Wi-Fi,

which is wireless networking.

Most modern computing systems have
wireless capabilities like mobile phones,

smart televisions and laptops.

We connect to wireless networks
through radios and antennas.

The last method will go over uses fiber
optic cables to connect to a network.

This is the most expensive method since
fiber optic cables allow greater speeds

than all the other methods, fiber optic
gets its name because the cables contain

glass fibers that move data through
light instead of electricity.

This means that we send ones and
zeros through a beam of light instead of

an electrical current
through a copper wire.

How cool is that?

But our cables have to
connect to something.

We don't just have millions
of cables going in and

out of computers to connect them together.

Instead, computers connect to a few
different devices that help organize our

network together.

The first device that your
computer connects to is a router.

A router connects lots of
different devices together and

helps route network traffic,
let's say we have four computers,

A, B, C and D connected together
through a router in the same network.

You want to send a file from
computer A to computer B.

A packets go through the router and

the router utilizes network protocols to
help determine where to send the packet.

So now our packet gets routed from
computer A to computer B, sweet.

What if we wanted to send a packet
to a computer not in our network?

What if we wanted to send a packet
to our friend Alejandro's computer.

Alejandro is on a different
network altogether.

Fortunately, our router knows how to
handle that to the packet will get

routed outside our network to our ISPS
network using networking protocols,

it's able to figure out where
Alejandro's computer is.

During this process, our packet is
traveling across many different routers,

switches and hubs, switches and hubs are
also devices that help our data travel.

Think of switches like
mail rooms in a building,

routers get our letters to the building,

but once we're inside we use the mail room
to figure out where to send a letter.

Hubs are like company memos, they
don't know who to send the memo to, so

they send it to everyone.

Working with network devices is important
to understand because it's likely that one

day you'll have users reporting
problems accessing the Internet,

you'll want to investigate your way up
the network stack, a technology stack.

In this case a network stack
is just a set of hardware or

software that provides
the infrastructure for a computer.

So the network stack is all the components
that makes up computer networking.

You might need to investigate
the network stack in your job.

You'd start with making sure the end
user computers are working properly.

Then you turn your attention to
other possible points of failure,

like the cabling, switches and routers
that work together to access the Internet.