CompTIA Network+ N10-008 – Networks and Their Basic Components

1. Overview of Networks

An overview of networks So when you think of a computer network, what comes to mind? Do you consider a router and a switch? Do you think of your wireless network at home when you access this video over? Is it limited to just computers? Is it limited to just the Internet? Is it limited to Wi-Fi networks or wired networks such as Ethernet or Fiber? Well, no, there are a lot of networks out there. There are a ton of them. And when it comes down to it, the purpose of networks is to make connections between machines.

Now, if you have an Apple watch, there’s a connection going between your watch and your phone over Bluetooth, and that is a network. It’s called a personal area network. There’s the typical WiFi network that you’re used to when your cellphone connects to the wireless access point to connect to the Internet, or your laptop connects to a hub, which then connects to a switch, which connects to a router, which connects to the Internet. There are all sorts of networks out there, and these networks have all been converging.

In the old days, we had different networks for different purposes. When I was growing up, we had a telephone network, and all it did was make analogue phone calls. And then we had computer networks that would transmit data back and forth, and they were separate things. But over time, all of this has merged, and now we have voice, video, and data all travelling over the same network. When you pick up your cell phone, it doesn’t matter if you’re making a voice call, sending a text message, or surfing the Internet for data. All of it is treated the same. It’s all ones and zeros going over a digital network. And now we have become so reliant on in our networks that we expect 100% uptime. And while realistically we can’t get 100%, we’ve come to expect at least 99.99%, which we call the “five nines” of availability.

What does that really equate to in our networks? In a business network, it means I’ve allowed five minutes of downtime a year. That’s it: 365 days, 24 hours in a day, and I have to be up for all of it with the exception of five minutes. That’s the challenge for network technicians. We’ve got to keep those networks up and keep that data flowing.

And that’s what we’re going to teach you how to do in this course. So what are some examples of network traffic? Well, there’s file sharing. Video chatting services such as Skype and FaceTime are available. They’re surfing the web when you go to Google, Demy, or JasonDion.com, or Dion Training. There’s social media with Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Facebook. There’s streaming video, such as the one you’re watching now, and YouTube. There’s email, there’s messaging, and there’s voice over IP. All of these are examples of network traffic. And there’s new network traffic being designed all the time. That’s what we’re going to be supporting with our networks, and it is a huge challenge to maintain 99.99% uptime, but we’re going to work our way through it as we go through this course.

2. Network Components

Network components. In the last video, we talked about why we use networks, and the whole purpose is to get data from one place to another and from one machine to another. Now, whether that’s carrying voice, video, or data, it’s going to have to get across a network. Now what composes the network? Well, that’s what we’re going to answer in this video. Network components can be things like clients, servers, hubs, wireless access points, switches, routers, media, and Wan links. Now, some of those terms probably look familiar, while others don’t.

So we’re going to go through each one individually in this lesson. The first one we have is clients, and these are the devices that the end user is going to access the network with. These can be workstations, laptops, tablets, smartphones, your TV, a server or other terminal device, and even your WiFi-enabled thermostat. All of these are considered clients. This can be any device that connects to a network. And we use this big bucket term called “client.” The next one we have is a server, and a server is something that provides resources to the rest of the network. Now if you’re at work, you’re probably familiar with an email server or a file server, right? And different servers provide different functions. There are email servers, web servers, file servers, chat servers, print servers, and all sorts of different kinds of servers. These can either be dedicated hardware or specialised software. That device then begins to function as a server. And we’ll talk more about that when we talk about the different models, whether it’s client, server, or peer-to-peer. The next one we have is a hub, and a hub is an old piece of technology. When I was growing up in the industry, we used hubs everywhere. Hubs were an easy way to connect network devices such as clients and servers. They could be interconnected to provide even more ports.

So I could connect one hub to another and daisy chain them. The problem with that is that it could lead to increased network errors. Basically, when you get hub information coming in, one port of the hub is going to spit out all of the other ports. So if you have a four-port hub and one person is talking and rebroadcasting it out to the other three people, we’re going to talk about COVID hubs a lot more in depth later on because they are the backbone of networking and switches are developed from hubs. Wireless access points Now a wireless access point is a device thatallows wireless devices to connect into a wired network. So if you’re using your laptop or your smartphone right now and you’re connecting it over your WiFi, you’re actually connecting to a wireless access point. These are commonly used in homes, small businesses, colleges, and even large enterprise networks. And effectively, a wireless access point is a wireless hub. Whatever is broadcast one way goes the other way as well. We’ll talk a lot more about wireless access points. We’ll get to wireless devices later in this class. A switch. A switch is a smarter version of a hub. It connects network devices such as clients and servers, just like a hub does.

They do, however, learn which devices are connected to which ports. So, if four things are connected to a switch, when person number one talks to the switch and wants to talk to person number four, only person number four will hear that message. They’re not going to broadcast it to all three other people. We’ll talk a lot more about switches later on when we get into Ethernet. Fundamental switches only route traffic from one port to the destination port. So we call them “smart hubs,” essentially, right? But we could refer to them as switches. These are going to provide you with more security and a more efficient use of bandwidth than a hub did. The next device we have is a router, and routers are used to connect two different networks together. They’re going to intelligently make forwarding decisions from one network to the next based on its logical address, which has been referred to as an “IP” or Internet protocol address. Most modern routers are going to rely on IP, although there are other routing protocols out there. We’re going to talk a lot more about routers. In fact, we have an entire section dedicated to routing. Next we have media, and media is what we use to connect two devices or a device to a switch port.

Now these can be things like copper cables, fiber optic cables, or even radio waves. It doesn’t really matter what media type you’re using if you’re using something like Bluetooth or WiFi, but we must understand that media are the things that connect everything. If there’s a break in the media, your networks aren’t going to work right. Each type of media has its own strengths and weaknesses. For instance, copper is very cheap to use, but it can’t go very far. Fiber optics can go really far, but it costs a lot of money. Each one has its own bandwidth limitations, capacity limitations, and distance limitations. We’re going to get into those specifics because you’re going to have to memorise each of them, including how many feet they cover. When we talk about copper, for instance, we’ll talk about that later when we get into Ethernet in a couple of lectures down the road. Wide area network, or WAN, links are what physically connect networks together. So when you look at the internet, it’s just a big series of Web links. We could only talk inside your house if I went to your house right now and connected my laptop to your network because you don’t have a wandlink. We wouldn’t be able to make it to the outside world. That’s what a Wan link allows you to do. And whether you’re using a landline, a DSL cable, fibre optics, cellular, satellite, or microwave, it doesn’t matter. It’s your outside-the-world connection. and it has to be routed through a router back to your network. This is going to connect your internal network to the external networks. And we do it in the same way that your small or home office would on the Internet.

3. Network Resources

Network resources. Now, when we talk about network resources, we have to think about how data is being moved around the network. And there are two main models that we’re going to talk about here. There’s the client-server model and the peer-to-peer model. Let’s start with the client-server model. The client-server model is going to use a dedicated server to provide access to files, scanners, printers, and other resources on the network. Network administration and backup are really easy because we have one central machine, the server, that all the resources are sitting on. So we can backup that server now that we’ve backed up all of the files. This makes client-server models the model of choice for most business networks.

Now, when we look at the benefits of a client-server model, it gives us that centralised administration. There are one or a few key servers that we can all focus on. There’s easier management because, again, it’s all on one or a few key servers that we can manage. And it does give us better scalability because I have all my stuff in one place and I can expand that. I can use cloud architecture if I need to or provide additional servers that all work in tandem under load balancing. And that’s going to give me a lot more benefit than trying to run things under the peer-to-peer model. Now, some of the drawbacks to client-server computing are that it does cost more money because it requires dedicated hardware and dedicated operating system software like Windows 2012 or Windows 2016 or Unix or Linux or something like that, which require a highly specialised skillset to run these things. And it requires these dedicated resources, whether they’re machines or software. And that operating system So that’s kind of the bad thing that we have when we talk about a client-server. Now, when I look at a peer-to-peer model, this is where peers, other machines, laptops, and desktops directly share resources together directly.

The administration and backup are much more difficult because all of the files are located in different places. If I’m sharing some PowerPoints with you and you’re sharing some Excel files with me, those files are on both of our machines, and we have to back up both of them, manage both of them, and set permissions on both of them. See how there’s redundancy at work? Now if I scale that up to 50 machines, that gets to be kind of a nightmare, right? That’s the drawback to peer-to-peer. Now, where is peer-to-peer useful? Well, if you think back about a decade ago, there was a software called Napster, which was a peer-to-peer file-sharing program. It is now being used for a variety of illegal activities, such as unauthorised music downloads and the like. But the concept behind it is the same. Each person who was part of the network gave and received files. It was peer-to-peer sharing. One of the advantages of peer-to-peer lending is the low cost. There’s no dedicated hardware, and there’s no dedicated software. We can all talk to each other whenever we want and create resources and networks whenever we want. So that was the specialised thing here: there was no special operating system, no dedicated resources, and the startup cost was very low. If I wanted to create a network and we had five computers, I might just turn one of them into a shared drive and share files off of my local laptop so you all could access them; it’s no problem. But that has some drawbacks because if my machine is off, you now can’t access anything. Whereas if there was a centralised server, you could. Now, what are some drawbacks? drawbacks of decentralized management, right? Everyone can control their own machine and what they’re sharing and not sharing. This becomes extremely inefficient for large networks, and it has horrible scalability. If I wanted to run a peer-to-peer network for an organisation the size of Facebook, it just would not work. It would be horrible. You have to have centralised management for stuff that gets that large.

4. Network Geography

Network geography. We specifically discussed how we share data in the previous lesson, whether through a client-server system or peer-to-peer. But we really didn’t talk about the distance over which we could share it. And that’s what we’re going to focus on in this lesson. So we’ll begin with the smallest and work our way up to the largest. The smallest one we have is called a “Pan” or “personal area network.” It is the smallest type of wired or wireless network. It covers the least amount of area, usually 10ft or less.so only a couple of meters. So what are some examples of a personal area network? Well, Bluetooth is a great one. It operates at a height of about 10 feet (3 meters). And if you’re getting into your car with your phone in your pocket and it starts wirelessly transmitting music from your phone to the radio in your car, that’s only three or four feet away.

That is actually a personal area network. What about your USB hard drive? When I connect my hard drive to my laptop over a USB connection, that is a serial connection, and that is considered a network. It is a personal area network. And if I have FireWire for a video camera or a webcam and I plug them in, that would also be a personal area network.

I like to think of it this way: if I put my arms out to my sides and spin them in a circle, that’s roughly my personal area network with a little more distance. The next one we have is called a “land.” This is a local area network. If you work in an office building, you probably have a desk at work. It connects components over a limited distance, generally up to about 100 metres or 300ft.Each segment can only go 100 metres if you’re using Cat 5 cabling, but can go further if you’re using fibre optic cabling. We’ll talk more about distance limitations, specifically in Ethernet fundamentals. Now, your networks can consist of Ethernet or WiFi. If you’re using Ethernet, you’re using the IEEE 802.3 standard. If you’re using WiFi, you’re using the IEEE 800 and 211 standards. We’ll talk specifically about each of these standards in a future lesson as we dig deep into protocols and standards.

Now, what are some examples of land? Well, the internal wired or wireless network in your office building, in your school, or in a classroom—those are all local area network connections. In fact, if you’re sitting at home watching this video right now, you’re sitting on your local area network inside your house, making that connection between you and your devices, your printers, and your other laptops, and all of that inside your house is part of your land. The next one we want to talk about is a campus area network, or a ca.

Now, a “campus area network” is a building-centric land that is spread out across numerous buildings in a certain area like a university, an industrial park, or a business park. So this can cover several miles or many buildings. For example, I teach at several colleges. Each of our colleges has a campus-wide network that spans our entire university. And so no matter which building you’re in, each building has its own land and local area network. Those lands are connected together to form the campus area network.

Now examples of this are college campuses, business parks and military bases. All of these together form what’s called a “campus area network.” The next one we have is what’s called a man, or a metropolitan area network. This is getting even larger. Now this is going to connect locations that are scattered across the entire city. This is larger than a can, but it’s smaller than a wide-area network. And this can cover an area up to about 25 miles, maybe even a little bit bigger depending on the size of your city. So let me go back to my example. One of the colleges I teach for is a community college. We have six campuses spread out across our city. Each of those campuses has a campus area network. However, those campus area networks are linked together to form a metropolitan area network, allowing all of our campuses to be part of the same university network.

Other examples of this would be if you looked at a city department like the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Police Department, which have lots of locations dotted around your cities and are connected together to form one network. These are some great examples of what a man would be like. And that brings us to our last one, which is a WAN, or wide area network. A wide area network now connects internal networks that are geographically separated. So this can consist of lease lines or virtual private networks that are tunneled over the Internet. Now, if you don’t know what those two terms are, don’t worry about it yet. We’re going to go into both of them later in this course. It’s going to cover COVID distances around the country or around the world. For example, the Internet is a wain. It is the largest waif. So I’m sitting in my home office right now, recording this, and I’m going to upload it to a file server that you’re going to then access from your home, wherever you are in the world. and that is a wider network connection.

Now, if you have a company, some of them may have a New York office and a California office. Those two networks can be tied together in a private intranet, which is essentially a private intranet connection essentially. And it is a wide-area network as well because we’re taking this very, very large network and connecting it together. For example, the United States government has offices all over the country, spanning three or four thousand miles, right?

All of those can be connected together through wide area network connections. So when we look at network geography, I want you to remember this diagram. here we have personal area network, then we have a local area network, then a campus area network, a metropolitan area network and a wide area network. If you can remember this one slide, you’ll be able to answer any questions you have as far as Pans, Lands, Cans, Mans, and Wands, because you’ll know how far they can go and what type of networks they’re using.

5. Wired Network Topology

Wired network topologies So when we talk about topologies for networks, we’re talking about it in one of two ways. One is the physical way: how are the devices physically connected together with the media? The second way is logical, which is how the traffic actually flows in the network. So if you see on the screen here, I have a logical diagram of what this network looks like. You can see which workstations are linked to which routers and switches.

But this is not how this network actually looks in the real world. For instance, the Windows 7 machine in the upper left might be on the third floor of the building, while the Windows 2012 machine on the upper right might be all the way down in the basement. You really don’t know based on this diagram because this is a logical topology. Now, we’ll learn how to read these diagrams throughout this course and what each of the icons are. But for right now, I want you to realise that the logical and physical topologies are different and can be different. So what are some of these options we have for topologies?

Well, the first one is what’s called a bus topology, and this is where you use a single cable that runs the length of the entire area that needs network connectivity. Each machine—each laptop or desktop—would then tap into that cable using either a T connector or a Vampire tab. Now what’s? A vampire tap? Well, it’s an old way of connecting networks. This big, thick metal cable ran through the room. You would connect your cable to it using a clamp that would tie into that cable and bite into it. Because they bit into each other, this is known as a vampire tap. Now, this is an older technology, and it’s not commonly used anymore. We hardly ever use bus topologies, but the devices on this cable would form what’s called a single collision domain, which means, as you can see here on the screen, there are six different devices here trying to talk. And if they all tried to talk at the same time, you would just have a collision because they’re all sharing the same cable, so they’d have to take turns. Now, the next topology we have is what’s called a ring topology, and this uses a cable, but instead of being a straight line, it runs in a circle. Each device in the ring could then talk on it, but again, they’re going to have to take their turn. The data would travel in a single direction, either anticlockwise or clockwise, depending on the network.

Now, we don’t use ring topologies much anymore, but the only ones we do use are what’s called a “fitty,” or a fibre distribution network. These are called fibre rings and usually when yousee fitty, they’re going to be used as tworings operating one on top of the other. Now, one of them is going to go clockwise, and one will go counterclockwise, and that’s for redundancy. Now, Network Plus sometimes tries to be a little tricky on the exam. So remember that when they’re talking about ring networks, they’re almost always going to be finicky networks. And so if they ask which of these topologies is redundant, they think of rings as redundant because they’re thinking of fibre networks. of these tiny networks. On the old token ring networks, there was no redundancy because it was a single ring. And if you cut it, it would then cut the network. So those would have token-ring networks connected by a single cable, and they would pass around an electronic token that told people when they could talk. So it was a very organised way of doing it, and you wouldn’t have all those collisions like you had back on the bus network.

The next one, and the one that we use on almost all of our modern networks, is called a star topology. Now you’ll notice all of the outlying machines are talking to a central point that’s usually going to be your switch. This single point is your switch or your wireless access point. And this is what we use for Ethernet in almost all of our networks nowadays. But you can use it with fiber, and you can use it with wireless if you’re using a star topology logically. But the problem with this is that you have one central device, and so if I have that switch in the middle and the switch fails because it loses power or we cut the cable, the entire network is going to fail because it’s a single point of failure. So remember that with Star, even though they’re very common and very inexpensive to use, you do have that single point of failure there in the middle. The next one we have is what’s called a “hub and spoke topology,” which is used for connecting multiple sites together. The reason we call it hub and spoke is because, if you think about it like the way airlines operate, they usually have hubs. For instance, Baltimore, where I live, is a hub for Southwest Airlines.

So, if I wanted to travel from Connecticut to California, I would fly from Connecticut to Baltimore, change planes, and then fly to California, because you go to the hub and then out to the spokes. same concept here with the networks. It’s very similar to a star, but there are multiple paths and multiple places where these hubs exist.

So, as you see here on the screen, I have Denver and Los Angeles as the hubs in my network, and everybody else is a spoke. So if I wanted to go from Atlanta to Seattle,  I would have to go from Atlanta to Denver, Denver to Seattle, or if I wanted to go from Minneapolis to San Francisco, I could go from Minneapolis to Denver, Denver to Los Angeles, and Los Angeles to San Francisco, right? And no matter which way I go, I have to go through either Los Angeles or Denver because those are the hub nodes. It’s not fully redundant because if the central office fails, like in Denver or Los Angeles, in this case, the whole network is going to fail again, right? And so that’s going to be a problem for us. So if we’re looking for redundancy, we go to full mesh. Now, full mesh is awesome for redundancy. Every single node or device is connected to every other node or device.

Now, this works really well if we have two or three machines. But when I start increasing the number of machines, it starts getting pretty crazy pretty quickly. Optimal routing is always available. So in this example here on the screen, you’ll see that I have six machines on this network, and every single one of them is tied to each other. So if I were doing this physically, I would need six network cards and six cables for every single machine.

And if I actually counted up the number of black lines there, how many different connections are there, and how many would there actually be? Well, it will be six times five, which is 30 divided by two, which is 15. So for six machines, it takes 15 cables. You see how this gets expensive really, really quickly. This is why you’re not going to see full-mesh except in the most redundant of networks. If you have something like nuclear command and control, they would want a full mesh network because you have a zero-defect mentality there. But in your business networks you’re probably not going to see full mesh.

It’s just too expensive to use. Now the next thing we have is what’s called a partial mesh. And a partial mesh is a hybrid of a full mesh and a hub and spoke. This is going to provide optimal routing between some sites, but not all sites. And it will essentially necessitate conducting a good survey to determine which of my sites are busy and which are not.

So, as you can see here in the diagram, if you start drawing your finger around, can you get from everywhere to everywhere else? Well, sometimes you’re going to have to go through one of those three central sites, right? And if one of those nodes goes down, can you still get to everywhere else? Well, yes, you can, right? Because we have additional redundancy here, you’re going to have to make sure you understand your traffic patterns so you know where to put those main hubs. And it basically becomes a modified hub and spoke configuration with more hubs than we had in a single hub and spoke configuration.

6. Wireless Network Topology

So we spent a lot of time in the last lecture talking about the different physical and logical topologies. Now the logical ones will still apply to wireless networks, but the physical ones are going to be a little bit different, mostly because we have two different modes of operation we’re going to operate our wireless networks in. So let’s look at the first one, which is infrastructure mode.

Infrastructure mode is the most common type of wireless network. In fact, it’s probably what you’re using to watch this video. If you’re sitting at home and you have wireless in your house and it connects to an outside provider through cable or fiber, that is an infrastructure mode device. You have a centrally managed device, your wireless access point, that you’ve given a name and probably a password, and you use it as you would a star topology in a physical network, but you’re doing it wirelessly. This is going to support wireless security controls and other benefits that you just don’t get when you go to our second mode, which is ad hoc. Ad hoc is decentralized. It operates peer-to-peer.

There are no routers and no access points at all. Instead, we just connect your laptop to mine, and we can talk and make routing decisions on the fly and make them dynamically. We can allow people to join, jump in, and jump out as much as they want.

If I remember correctly, it’s almost like the old school chat rooms we used to have on AOL or Comp, where people would come in, leave, and just come in and out all the time. Well, that’s how this wireless network would work. Now the third type we have is what’s called a wireless mesh, and you might think, “Oh well, that’s just going to be a combination of the other two.” Well, not really. A wireless mesh is completely different. A wireless mesh is an interconnection of different types of nodes, devices, and radios to create a mesh topology.

Now this is going to have different routers, gateways, clients, servers, and radio antennas. So we can use different radiofrequencies—things like Bluetooth, WiFi, microwave, satellite, and cellular. And we can connect all of these into a single network to increase network access. This can give us redundant and reliable connections as we move forward, especially in harsh environments. So where might we use a wireless mesh topology? Well, after there’s a hurricane or some other kind of disaster-related event, people will go in to do humanitarian assistance, and when they come, they bring their networks with them, and they need a way to communicate.

Some will communicate via cellular, some via wireless, some via cellular, satellite, microwave, and some via landline. However, if the landlines are unreliable, they can use this wireless to supplement them. Now, if I can get a wireless connection in our camp that we’ve set up to help people. And then we need to have a connection back to America or back to whatever your home country is. We might use a satellite for that. And so combining those two technologies together creates that mesh network. And so we can expand our networks across a large area by combining things like microwave, which can go 30 or 40 miles, with our endpoints being wireless, which can only do maybe 100 or 200 feet per access point. And so by creating this mesh, we can really expand our access, as you can see here in the diagram, where I’m using satellite to go thousands of miles, microwave to go tens of miles, and then wireless, which goes tens of feet.

7. Internet of Things (IoT)

The internet of things What is the Internet of things? Well, it’s pretty much everything. If your refrigerator has a wireless connection, it’s part of the Internet of Things. In my house, we have a Nest thermostat, which is part of the Internet of Things. I have smart TVs that access the Internet and let me watch YouTube and videos, and that is part of the Internet of Things. The other things we have are things like traditional servers and laptops and desktops. But, whatever they are, they all appear to be available online nowadays.

And that is where the Internet of Things comes in. And you have to understand some of the technologies that are used by the Internet of Things to pass your Network Plus exam. So what are some specific Internet of Things technologies? Well, the first ones are 800 and 211. Do you remember what that stood for? That’s right, wireless networking (8211, AB, GNor AC), which we’ll go over later. And you can operate those as either infrastructure or ad hoc.

And if you have an Internet of Things device, such as a wireless speaker, a refrigerator, or an athermostat, they can connect to the outside world via 801 and 211. Bluetooth is the next one. And if you see in the upper right that Bluetooth fob, that actually has a Bluetooth receiver in it. Now, why would you want your keys to be Bluetooth-enabled? Well, if you lose them, you can use your cellphone to figure out where they are based on Bluetooth. And because these are low-power devices, because they’re small and portable, they do use a low-energy variant of Bluetooth, which allows them to have a mesh network. So your keys can talk to your cellphone via Bluetooth, and your cell phone over cellular can tell you where they are. The next one we have is RFID.

If you’ve ever gone to a hotel room, you’ve gotten a key like the one I show here on the screen. This key has a chip embedded in it, and it uses an electromagnetic field when you put it by the door lock to read the tag and let you in the room. The next one we have is NFC, which is near field communication. This will allow two electronic devices to communicate within 4 cm. So Samsung was actually one of the first to really use near-field communications for Samsung Pay.

And devices like Apple Pay and Google Pay use the same type of technology. When you put your phone on the reader, it can read it through near-field Field Communication. The next one we have is infrared. And if you take your TV remote home, that one operates with line of sight using an infrared frequency using light beams, and that’s how that’s going to work for you. And Internet of Things technologies can use infrared as well, although it’s a much older technology and most of them aren’t going to use it these days. The next two are used very commonly nowadays, and they’re actually new technologies. Zwave is the first one. It will provide you with a short-range, low-latency data transfer at much lower rates and power consumption than WiFi.

Again, Wi-Fi___33 can burn your battery up pretty quickly. And so for these Internet of Things devices, we’re trying to save battery where possible. Mostly, you’re going to find Z-Wave used for home automation. So for the exam, if you see Zwave, think home automation, turning lights on and off, turning sounds on and off, right? that kind of thing. Ant+ is the next one on the list. It is used for the collection and transfer of sensor data. So if you have a tyre pressure system in your car, it may be using Ant Plus. It’s used with remote control systems for things like tyre pressure, TVs, lights, ETCA.

Some of that home automation stuff again. But really, what you’re probably going to see is Ant Plus. They’ll call it tyre pressure Z Wave for home automation, and it’ll be part of the Internet of Things. So when you look at the “Internet of Things,” it is all of these devices that are now connected to our networks. And from a security standpoint, that’s a little frightening, and we’ll talk about that more in the security section later on. But from a technology standpoint, it’s pretty darn cool. We can do all sorts of stuff. I can pull up my cell phone from anywhere in the world and turn up or turn down the temperature of my house using my automated thermostat. These are pretty cool techniques and technologies that we have on the Internet of Things.