Hey what's up guys welcome to CertBros In this video we're going to be talking about computer networks Okay so what is a computer network? Well first let's break it down What is a network? The definition of a network is a group or system of interconnected people or things. So it would be fair to say a computer network would be a group or system of interconnected computers right?
And that's exactly what it is. A computer network is anything where more than one computer is connected to each other. Traditionally a computer network would consist of desktop computers, servers, printers etc. but these days we live in a connected world.
We still have desktops, servers, printers but we now have a vast number of smart devices connected to our networks as well. Most of you will have a mobile phone, maybe a tablet, security cameras, even smart lights are found on networks these days and the list really does go on and on. So let's take a look at some basic networks and we can see what they look like. First one that should be familiar to most of you.
Here we have a switch, a router, a wireless access point, a desktop and a phone all connected to the same network. This is a pretty common home setup. It's worth noting that in most home networks the switch and wireless access point will be built into the router. Generally speaking any network in a single area is called a local area network or LAN.
The LAN is usually connected to the outside world using a socket in the wall that your internet service provider has installed. This socket connects you to something called the wide area network or WAN. The purpose of a WAN is to connect separate local area networks together.
The most obvious example of a WAN would be the internet. However businesses might have private WANs to connect multiple sites together. So now let's look at a more business type network. So we have all of our office computers and these would usually plug into a wall or floor socket.
These sockets will have cables either running through the floor or the ceiling back to a special room called a wiring closet. This room might also be called a patch room or a server room. In the wiring closet all of these devices will connect to a stack of switches which are mounted onto racks. Depending on the size of the network there may be multiple wiring closets which all connect to each other say for example on different floors. Keep in mind though this has been simplified to give you a general idea.
Lastly we'll look at another type of network that might not be so obvious. Now I said before I'm sure you all have smartphones of some sort. Now these phones generally have internet access via 3G, 4G and even 5G. Well you can think of these as basically a giant wireless network for your phones. Somewhere close to you there will be a giant tower that allows you to connect and get internet access.
The closer you are to these towers the better the connection is likely to be. So these are just some common network types and really just an introduction to some basic network. devices.
So the next logical question is why? Why do we need networks? Well let's imagine life without networks for a second. If we want to print a document we would need to directly connect a printer which is fine but what if we have multiple computers? We would need multiple directly connected printers right?
Which isn't so fine. The beauty of a network is we can share resources. If I have a file and I want to send it to someone, I can. They can also share the file with everyone else. We can have shared printers that everyone can use.
We can even have servers that could store these files for us. Of course, file sharing and printing is just one example, but this could be pretty much anything. And all of this even before we start talking about the internet.
which by the way is just a giant network. With the internet we can search for anything we want. We literally have the world's knowledge at our fingertips.
We have email, we can message our friends, we can use hosted computing, telephone calls over the internet and of course awesome YouTube content. So networking has changed the world and how we live in it. It's a topic I still get excited about and there's no shortage of new things to learn. We'll go over a lot of this in more detail as we go. This video is part of our full CCNA course which can be found in the description.
so please feel free to go and check that out. If you like this video don't forget to like, comment and subscribe. Other than that, thank you for watching!