Chapter 3: Your Net and the Internet

Overview

The idea of local area networking and the Internet evolved separately but concurrently over the period of time from (roughly) 1965 to the current day. They're really two very different things, as I'll explain shortly. Both local area networking and the Internet are very big topics, and I can't treat either in detail in this book. What I'm really trying to spotlight are the places and ways that local area networks (LANs) and the Internet connect. It's a very rare LAN these days that doesn't have an Internet connection, and the #1 reason people put home or small office networks in place (be they wired or wireless) is to share a single, high-speed Internet connection among the several computers in the home or office.

It's true enough that when everything works correctly, you don't need to know much about how the Internet works under the hood. On the other hand, when things don't work-or when they stop working-the more you know about how your computers and networking equipment operate, the more likely it is that you can put things right without having to depend on other people to fix it for you.

In the Wi-Fi world, you sometimes need to know what a 'subnet' is, and there may come the (dreaded) day when a bright young tech support rep asks you over the phone, 'Can you ping any of your other machines?' What I'm going to focus on in this chapter are those aspects of Internet operation that you're likely to encounter in Wi-Fi work. I encourage you not to stop there, but to keep going, and read up on both local area networks and the Internet.