In this lesson, I want to show you what some
of these devices look like.
We talked in the last lecture about hubs and bridges
and switches and routers and all of their different uses
and placements throughout the network.
But when you look at a small office
or a home office network,
you might have everything in a single device,
something that looks like this.
Now, as we look at this a little bit closer,
you could see the front, it's going to have all the blinking
lights and tell you what's going on.
But if we look at the back, we'll actually see
that this single device actually has multiple
different functions in it.
The first function it has is
what's called the wide-area network,
and this is where we're going to connect a cable line
or a coaxial cable that's going to provide our internet access.
Now, that gives us our external network,
that wide-area network,
but if we want to connect it to our internal network,
we have to have a routing function.
And so there's a built-in router
that routes the wide-area network connection into this
internal or LAN connection.
Now, the internal connection is going to happen over these
ports, and these switch ports are going to be just a simple
switch that's embedded into this device.
So we have a switch and we have a router,
and we have this wide-area network connection.
Additionally, we have over here, all the way over here,
this is where an antenna gets plugged in
because this device has a wireless access point
built in as well.
So now we have a router, a switch,
and a wireless access point all in a single device.
But there's still something else here.
When I talked about this wide-area network connection,
we are actually talking about plugging in coaxial cable,
but converting it so it can talk with these devices here
that are on Cat5 or ethernet cables.
To do that, we're going to be using a media converter.
And so in this one single device,
we have four different functions.
We have our switch, we have our router,
we have our wide-area network connection or media converter,
and we have a wireless access point.
Now, do all of these things have to exist in a single box?
Well, no.
And in fact, most office networks,
we're going to break these out into individual boxes
or machines or functions.
So let me show you what that looks like.
Let's start with the media converter.
So I talked about in the combined box,
we were taking coaxial cable in and converting it.
So we can talk over Cat5 or ethernet.
Well media converters can convert two dissimilar
signals any way you want.
You might go from fiber to cable.
You might go from cable to ethernet,
you might go from fiber to ethernet,
you might go all sorts of different ways.
In fact, right here I have two different media converters
and actually part of a set.
So one is the transmitter and one is the receiver.
So as I bring these over here so you can see them,
I have my transmitter on this side
and my receiver on this side.
Now you'll notice that they both have HDMI jacks right here.
Now if I turn them around, you'll see
that they have Cat5 or ethernet.
What these are used for is
for me to be able to take a long distance run of video
over HDMI and be able to push it over a Cat5
or an ethernet cable.
Now, why would I want to do that
and send it from this transmitter over HDMI, over Cat5,
from Cat5 to the other one,
and then from Cat5 back to HDMI?
Well, because HDMI can only do short cable runs.
In fact, anything over about 20 feet,
you're going to have problems with your HDMI connections.
So if you're going to have a big home theater set up,
you're going to need some kind of a media converter like this
to be able to run things from your satellite dish to your TV
or from your cable box to the projector
or whatever those things are.
And that's exactly what we use this for.
This is to be able to go to do a 50 foot run from
where our cable boxes are all the way up to our projector is
so that we can then display the information we want.
And being able to do that media conversion from HDMI over
to Cat5 allows us to do that.
Now the next thing I want to talk about is a switch.
And we talked about the fact
that this had a switch built into it in
this all-in-one device.
Well, switches can be small or they can be big.
In fact, right here I have a pocket-size switch.
This is an unmanaged switch.
Now this switch has five ports
and it is an unmanaged switch,
meaning that it's going to gimme the benefits of a bridge
and it's going to give me the benefits of a hub,
where I have a single collision domain per port
and one broadcast domain for the entire five ports.
But other than that, this is a dumb switch.
It doesn't have VLANs, it doesn't have any
of the ethernet features that we're going to talk about.
Instead, this is just a simple dumb switch
and it costs me about five to $7.
It will allow me to take the network connection coming in
and then pass that out to the remaining ports.
That's all this is going to do.
And again, our combination device already had one
of those built in for us.
Now the next thing we were talking about was it had
wireless capability.
And so for that, we're going to use a wireless access point.
Now, most of you, when you think of a wireless access point,
are probably actually thinking of a combination device.
If you look at your wireless access point,
you turn around the backside and it has four
of those switch ports in there,
it's actually a combination device.
It's a wireless access point with a router
and with a switch just like the
one I showed you at the beginning.
But you also can have just a
wireless access point like this.
And as you look at this one, you'll see
that I have the two network antennas,
but if I turn it over to the side,
you're going to see there's only a single network jacks.
And the reason for that is this is just a media converter
to go from Cat5 to wireless.
That's what a wireless access point is.
It's that simple.
It's a very simple device.
It takes whatever's coming in over this Cat5 connection
and it sends it out over these antennas.
That's all wireless access point does.
Now, when I go back to the original one I showed you,
this one is a combination device.
It has a wireless access point, but it also has a router
and it also has a switch.
This one does not.
It's simply a wireless access point.
So I know we covered a lot in this lesson,
but what I really wanted to show you was
that these devices can be broken apart into individual
components, but a lot of times, they're not.
And so when you go to the store
and you say, "Hey, I want to buy a wireless router,"
there really is no such thing as a wireless router.
There is a wireless access point switch
and router combination box
that is marketed as a wireless router,
but there is no such thing as a wireless router.
Now the reason is
because people who are marketing things are marketing them
to consumers, and so they're trying to dumb it down
to the easiest thing to understand.
But on the Network+ exam, I want you to remember
that each of these boxes
and each of these functions do a different thing.
And if they're talking about a wireless access point,
that's not the same as a wireless router,
which has a switch, a router,
and a wireless access point all combined together.
So we'll talk more about this as we go through the course,
but hopefully this was helpful to give you a general idea of
what some of these devices are.
Now, I'll see you in the next lesson.