<aside> 🌎 Networks: A collection of interconnected computers that have the ability to communicate with one another

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WAN vs LAN

• Refers to the geographical area covered
• WAN is over a wide geographical area, and much less secure as data travels through many networks so can be intercepted more easily
• Internet is considered a WAN
• LANs are more secure
• With WANs, data is travelling over long distances and being owned by many different people so much greater risk of it being intercepted, especially if not encrypted

Network structures

Client-server structure

• Services (e.g. file storage) are made available on servers to which clients connect
• Web servers, where websites are hosted, are the most common
• Processing could also be centralised
• If the server fails for any reason, the service cannot be provided for that server

Peer-to-peer networks

• Each computer has the same status as the others
• No computer acts as a server, meaning that all computers must work together to fulfil the required task
• Most common example - file sharing
• Can also be used to share the processing load for complicated calculations (distributed processing), where difficult problems that require extensive processing time are split up into smaller chunks, and then distributed/shared around peers.