Chapter 7: Hooking Up Your Network

Overview

Buying computers does not make a network! You have to interconnect computers to enable them to communicate. You can set up communications among computers in several ways; the one you choose depends on your budget and bandwidth needs. Okay, most of it depends on your budget!

Transmission media is a fancy, generic term for cabling and atmospheric transmission. The media provide the means by which computers talk to each other across a network. In fact, computers can communicate through the airwaves using broadcast transmissions, through the wiring in a building, or through fiber- optic cabling across a campus. Linking long-haul or Internet connections to local networks means that there's almost no limit to what your network can access!

In this chapter, you examine different methods to interconnect networks using cables and other media. You find out which media are appropriate for desktop access and which work best for server-to-server activity. You also discover more about network anatomy as we tackle two ticklish subjects namely, backbones and wide area network (WAN) links.