From the course: Computer Literacy for Mac

Understanding networks and internet access - macOS Tutorial

From the course: Computer Literacy for Mac

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Understanding networks and internet access

“

- [Instructor] In the context of discussing computers, a network is basically two or more computers or peripheral devices, such as printers or scanners, connected to and communicating with each other. Technically, one computer connecting to another computer is considered a very basic network. More often though, computers and other devices on the network communicate through a device called a router. A router handles and manages all the network traffic, which is essentially the data being passed from one device to another and ensures that the right data gets to the right device. Now, the point of a network is to make it easy for all the computers in your home or office to communicate with one another. This allows you to share files directly with other computers without having to copy the files to a disk or to email them. Networks are also operating system agnostic, so you can have both Macs and PCs on the same network. A network also allows you to have shared devices, like printers and scanners, so each person doesn't have to have their own. Another very common purpose of a network is to share a single internet connection between all of your computers. Many people these days have high-speed broadband internet services in their homes and need to share that connection with several computers and other internet-enabled devices in their household, like mobile phones. Routers generally all have ports to accept a connection from a broadband modem. High-speed services, such as cable, DSL, and fiber optics, are considered broadband. It's important to understand that just connecting to a network does not mean you're connected to the internet. Connecting to a network means you're connected to the other devices on the network. This is known as your local area network, or LAN. For internet service to be available to all the computers on your LAN, the internet modem must also be connected to the router. The internet connection is known as the wide area network, or WAN. Basically, the entire internet outside of your LAN is considered the WAN, and more often than not these days, the modem provided by your internet service provider is also a router, negating the need to have a separate router. Now, there are two main ways for your devices to connect to a network, wired connections and wireless connections. Wired connections involve cables that look like this, commonly called ethernet connections. The advantage of a wired connection is it requires very little setup or configuration. For the most part, you just plug one end of the cable into your router, plug the other end into your computer, adjust or check your settings, and you're immediately connected to your network and the internet. Wireless connections, often called wifi connections, usually involve a little more setup, but offer the advantage of freeing your device from cables and allowing you to connect to your network and the internet from anywhere within range of the wireless signal, and that's another important point. In order to broadcast a wifi signal, you must have a wifi-enabled router, but most internet service providers today give you routers with wifi capabilities, and you can also purchase wifi routers relatively inexpensively in any computer store. So in this chapter, we're going to look at how to connect to a network both via ethernet and wifi.

Contents