-: So, when you think of a computer network,
what comes to your mind?
Do you think of a router and a switch?
Do you think of your wireless network at home
that you're accessing this video over?
Is it limited to just computers?
Is it limited to just the internet?
Is it limited to just wireless or wired networks,
like ethernet or fiber?
Well, no.
There are a lot of different types of networks out there.
And when it comes down to it,
the purpose of these networks is to make connections
between lots of different types of machines.
For example, if you have an Apple Watch,
or some kind of smart watch,
there's actually a connection
between your watch and your phone happening over Bluetooth.
And guess what? That is actually a network.
It's called a personal area network.
Now there's also the typical wifi network that you're using
when you want to connect your tablet
to your wireless access point at home
and then connect out to the internet.
Or maybe your desktop is connecting to a hub
and then connecting to a switch
and that switch connects to a router
and that router connects you to the internet.
You see, there's all sorts of different networks out there
and these networks have all become converged over time.
You see, in the old days,
we had different networks for different purposes.
When I grew up, we had a telephone network
and all it did was allow you to make analog phone calls.
And then we had computer networks
and they would transmit data back and forth
and these were both separate things
that would occur on separate networks and separate cabling.
We had phones for analog
and we had data networks for digital things,
but over time all of this merged and converged
and now we have voice, video and data
all traveling over the same network.
These days, when you pick up your cell phone
it really doesn't care whether you're making a voice call,
whether you're sending a text message,
or whether you're going to be surfing the internet
using that connection,
it all happens over your data connection.
To the phone and the carrier, it's all treated the same.
It's just ones and zeros going out over a digital network
over this cellular connection.
Now because of this convergence,
and our reliance on networks,
we expect a really high availability and uptime
for all of our networks.
As someone who used to be
an IT director for a large organization,
I can tell you that our customers seem to expect
100% uptime, but guess what?
That is not realistic
because that means we would never have any downtime.
And so instead, our promise to our customers
in our business networks usually is something like
99.999% uptime.
This is what we call the five nines of availability.
Now notice this isn't 100%, but it's pretty darn close
and we consider this highly reliable.
Now, what does this equate to in the real world
if I had a five nines type of network?
Well, it means that throughout the course of the entire year
as the IT director,
I'm only allowed to have five minutes of downtime.
That's it.
Five whole minutes each and every year of downtime
and the rest of the year,
365 days, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,
I have to be up and running.
That is a big challenge that we face
as network technicians and network administrators.
And we've got to keep those networks up and running and
keep that data flowing.
Now in this part of the course,
that is exactly what I'm going to teach you how to do
by ensuring you understand the fundamentals of networks
and how to troubleshoot things when they break.
Now, once we have those networks up and running,
you may be wondering what kind of things can we do with it?
In other words, what kind of network traffic
can we expect to see within our networks?
Well, there's file sharing,
there's video chatting like Skype and FaceTime,
there's surfing the web
like when you go to Google or Facebook or diontraining.com,
there's social media like LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter,
there's streaming video,
like what you're watching right now, or YouTube or Netflix.
We have emails and instant messaging and voice over IP
and lots of different things.
You see the point here is that
there are lots of different types of traffic
going across our network all the time.
And every day there's new types of network traffic
being designed too.
And guess what?
As a technician, you're going to be expected to support
all of them.
Supporting all of this different network traffic
is a huge struggle and a big challenge,
especially if you want to maintain those
five nines of availability of 99.999% uptime,
but we're going to work through all of that and
all of the different challenges and how to overcome them
as we go throughout the next few sections
of the course together.
So what are we going to cover in this section of the course?
Well, we are going to be focused on domain two and
just a little bit of domain three.
Now domain two is networking
and domain three is hardware.
In domain two, we're going to cover parts of objectives
2.2, 2.4, 2.7 and 2.8.
From domain three, we're going to cover parts of objective 3.1.
Now objective 2.2 states that you must compare and contrast
common networking hardware.
Objective 2.4 states that you must summarize services
provided by network hosts.
Objective 2.7 states that you must compare and contrast
internet connection types, network types and their features.
Objective 2.8 states that given a scenario,
you must use networking tools.
And objective 3.1 states
that you must explain basic cable types,
their connectors, features, and purposes.
First, we're going to be taking a look at
the different pieces of equipment
that we use in our networks
as we dive into our networking hardware lesson.
Then, we're going to talk about the different types of networks
that you may encounter in the field.
Next, we're going to discuss the internet of things, or IOT,
which includes a lot of different types of network clients
that connect to our small office and home office networks
to perform unique features and functions.
After that, we're going to move into a few lessons on cabling
where we're going to focus on twisted pair cables,
fiber optic cables, and coaxial cables.
Then we'll move into our coverage of
the different networking tools
that you're going to use as a technician.
After that, we're going to move into a series of
demonstration videos where I'm going to show you
how to build a cable, wire up a computer network,
and conduct some basic troubleshooting and testing
of your network using different networking tools
that we discussed throughout our networking tools lesson.
So let's dive into this section
on networking basics and get started.