Hello and welcome to my Introduction to Networking video series. My name is Luke and
it is my goal to help you get a solid foundation in understanding what networks are all about.
This video series is perfect for anyone who is completely new to networking.
Whether you're interested in a career in it or you're just simply curious,
this is the right place for you. These videos can also help you if you're struggling with a college
or university course and you just need a little bit more understanding to get across the line.
Now throughout this series, I'm going to assume that you have no networking experience at all. The
goal of my work here is to lay a solid foundation that you can then build on throughout your career.
In this video, we're going to start by understanding simply what a network
actually is. So if you're ready, let's now consider this question, what is a network?
A network may already be familiar to you. Maybe you have your own network at home or perhaps
you've helped someone to run a network at a school or at your job. But can you really tell me what a
network actually is? I would like to give you this little challenge now. Please pause this
video and think to yourself, how can we define what a network actually is? I would like you to
pretend that you need to explain this to someone who knows absolutely nothing about networking.
Okay, so how did you go? Did you get a definition you're happy with? Well if you did,
congratulations! Well done! For those of you who are completely new to networking, here is
a little definition that I came up with. I define this as "a system that allows multiple devices to
communicate with one another". Let's take this definition and build on this a little bit now.
At work or at home you will have a bunch of devices. These are things like computers,
printers, TVs and so on. And you connect all of these together by means of a network.
When the devices are connected, they're able to share information between each other. This could
be something simple, like sending a document to a printer, sending an email or streaming a video.
This can also be used for sharing access to the internet. Now mostly users on a network are
unaware of the network they're using. As long as they can browse the Net, or do their job,
access Instagram or whatever it is they like to use, then they're usually happy. They don't
need to know the specifics of it. Now for all these devices to communicate, they do need to
be connected together somehow. Now one way is to plug cables into all these devices and
connect them to another special device, called a switch. I will explains what is a switch later on,
for now just think of a switch as some networking equipment that we use to connect things together.
Let's take a little time now to think about how we connect our devices to this switch.
Think of a computer lab in a school. The switch that these devices connect to, these computers,
will likely be in a different room or maybe it's mounted up on a wall somewhere.
In either case, the computer in the lab will connect to the network by using a wall socket.
Another cable from behind this wall socket, will run through the wall to another location,
this then connects to something that we call a patch panel. And you can see one
here on your screen right now. As I said before, this may be in a cabinet somewhere
on the wall. It might be in the same room, or it might be in another room entirely.
So each wall socket that we plug a computer into, connects back to one of these ports on
the patch panel. We can then connect each of these ports directly into the switch.
Now, that's one of the ways that we can keep our cabling nice and tidy and organized.
You might even have a switch at home. Most homes don't have the luxury of wall sockets,
so often we have devices directly connected to the switch. Remember of course though, there's
a lot more detail to switches. I will tell you a bit more about those in future, as we get to that.
Devices can also be connected together wirelessly. A common way to do this is
with a Wireless Access Point. A wireless network like this is often called Wi-Fi.
An example of this is when you're using your phone. It's really impractical and often
impossible to cable it into your network, so wireless is by far your best option.
The access point, that is, the Wireless Access Point, is basically the same thing as a switch,
but it doesn't use cables. More than one device can connect to the access point at a time,
but we don't have all the messy cabling that we get sometimes with a switch.
We can also connect a switch and an access point together with a cable.
In this way, devices that use cables, which are 'wired devices', can also be a part of
the same network, as devices that don't use cables, which are 'wireless devices'.
So having both wired switches and Wireless Access Points gives us more connection options.
For example, imagine that you have a laptop and you're working in an office.
You may connect it to the network using a cable when you're sitting down at your desk,
where you do most of your work. But sometimes, you'll need to give a
presentation in the boardroom and for this, when you have this meeting in the boardroom,
you remove the cable and you connect your laptop to Wi-Fi. So you don't have cables connected
everywhere, which makes things a lot easier for you as a user to connect to the network
Whether our devices are wired or wireless, the goal is still the same. We want to be able to have
one device send information to another device. But for this to work properly, the sender and
the receiver both need to understand each other. We could say that they both need to speak the same
language. Now in the network, speaking the same language means that the devices need to agree
on how data is sent, how it is received, how it is organized, and how it is handled. Basically,
they have a process on how to handle this information and they have to agree on the
same process. Now this language that they speak is called a Protocol, and there are a lot of
different protocols out there. The ones we use will vary depending on what's needed at the time.
Network Software and Hardware are designed with these protocols in mind. You will often hear of
protocols such as Ethernet and TCP. These ones are used for sending information from one device to
another. But you may also hear of protocols like HTTP, which is specifically used for accessing
websites. Or you might hear of SMTP, which is specifically used for sending and receiving email.
The truth is, usually we have several protocols working together to get a common task done.
We'll take a bit of a deeper look at this sometime in a future video. I really want to help you to
understand networking, so throughout this video series, I would like to offer the opportunity to
test your understanding, which will help you to find areas that perhaps you haven't understood
as well as others. To do this, I have quiz questions, like the ones you can see here.
These are intended, not to be simple multiple choice questions ,but ones that are well,
they make you think! They make you really work out if you've understood what you've learned.
The answer to these, as well as some explanations of them are available
on my website - networkdirection.net and you can see the link to that here on the screen.
So congratulations! You have made it through the very first video in this
series and I really hope that you've enjoyed this and I hope that you'll follow along
with me in my next video, where we will investigate different types of Networks.