Subtitles of the Movie

Let's talk about the differences really briefly between wireless and wired networks. Let's talk about wired networks first. We know that wired networks traditionally use a physically-connected transmission media. When we're talking transmission media, we're talking wiring, using the CAT5 cable or fiber. And the CAT5, as we know, is copper wiring and fiber is made out of glass or, or plastic. But essentially wires have to connect everything that's connected to a wired network. Even connected to the Internet, even devices that, that access your network from out on the network usually connect to a hub, which connect to a router, which connect to something else. The point is, wires connect wired networks. Now, the physical containment of these wires helps keep wired networks secure. By physical containment, we mean that between two devices, for example, there's physically a wire that is connected between those two devices and they, uh, transmissions are confined to that wire. In order to eavesdrop on those transmissions, you have to actually break into that wire or, or establish a connection through a hub or through a tap or something like that to get into that wired network. It's physically confined by that wire. Ok? Now, wireless networks, on the other hand, are not restricted by physical media connections. They use the air and airwaves as their medium. Radio waves are all over the place. There's no direct connection that, that is confined to a wire between two devices. Now, wireless networks give you a lot of advantages. Greater mobility is, of course the biggest advantage. That's the main reason why people love wireless networks. They can move around. They can sit on their couch and surf the net on the laptop or they can go to a cafŽ and surf the Internet, uh, from a, uh, wireless access point there. Wireless networks are very easy to set up also. Uh, with wired networks you have to know about how to terminate cable, where to plug it in, what the distance limitations were and things like that. Well, you've got some limitations in wireless networks like that, but essentially the average person doesn't need to know all that. Wireless networks are very easy to set up and can be set up in a matter of minutes. Now, wireless networks use a wide variety of transmission media. They mainly use radio, microwaves and infrared light as transmission media. We'll talk about some more of those things as we go. Now, wireless networks allow devices to dynamically connect and disconnect to the network so that let's say you're walking along the street with your PDA and that PDA can connect to a network and when it gets out of range of that network and gets into the range of another network, it can connect automatically if it's so configured. So this enables portable devices to connect and enables them to be mobile. Essentially wireless networks bring all the traditional network services that you would have; surfing the web, e-mail, even music and video to mobile devices that, uh, we have on our person. Cell phones, PDAs laptops, things that we travel with so we're not confined to having to go into an office and plus our laptops into a wire and just sit at that desk and, uh, do the things we need to do on the Internet. Unfortunately, however, wireless networks also impose greater security risks and this is for a wide variety of reasons. First of all, they're easy to set up and we know that with ease of setup sometimes security is sometimes forgotten. Also, because of the physical restrictions that wired networks have, it's a little bit more secure. Wireless networks don't have those. We're going to talk about some more security risks a little bit later and we're also going to talk about how to reduce those risks as we go as well.