1.4 Wired and Wireless Networks

1.4 Wired and Wireless Networks

1. WAN

   • Wide Area Network
     • Computers are connected over a large geographical area. This could be several buildings/sites, town wide, county wide or even country wide.
     • WAN uses external hardware and external infrastructure e.g. use of satellite, phone lines or The Internet, provided by a telecoms company
     • The biggest WAN would be a global collection of networks (known as The Internet)

2. LAN

   • Local area network
     • Computers are connected together over a small geographical area such as a single building or a single site
     • LAN has its own infrastructure of cabling and network hardware due to distance and practicalities

3. MBPS

   • Megabits Per Second.

4. PAN

   • Personal Area Network
     • Personal devices are connected, often in the home
     • Transmission over a short distance (10m) by devices such as laptops, phones, tablets, media players, speakers, printers
     • Bluetooth could be used as well as wi-fi/cables

5. DNS

   • Domain Name System.

6. Fibre optic cables

   • This transmit data through light so do not suffer from electrical interference.
   • Data can be transmitted over very large distances without any loss of signal quality
   • They are able to transmit data at a higher bandwidth.
   • They are very expensive

7. MAN

   • Metropolitan Area Network
     • Devices are connected in a city
     • Less common now that it used to be due to the widespread availability of fast mobile data using 4G

8. Bandwidth

   • Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transmitted

9. There are two ways of setting up a network to share data and services where computers have different relationships with each other

   • Client Server
     • The network relies on a central server
     • All clients (devices) request services from the server (e.g. print services / file services)
     • Additional hardware would be needed e.g. high end powerful servers
     • Client computers are a lower spec than the server
     • Servers can be specialised eg printer server, email server Server can be a computer or the software
   • Peer-Peer
     • All computers have equal status
     • Each device can act as a client and a server
     • All devices can request and provide network services
     • No additional hardware / software needed to set up this type of network so are easy to set up