Without the use of a hardware equipment, the existence of a network is unimaginable. In this section we will examine networking hardware devices which are widely used in almost every type of network.

Introduction to networking hardware

On a very high level, there are two types of transmission technology that are in use as of today.

1. Broadcast based transmission, and
2. Point-Point links

In broadcast based network, computers send packets on the network that every other connected computer will receive and process. Such computer networks that are based on the broadcast transmission are usually slower and with ever increasing number of computers on the network, it becomes difficult to provide faster transmission speed.

Thanks to some of the network devices which makes our life easy by cutting down on broadcast and provide unicast based transmission. In unicast based transmission, there is only one sender and one receiver, often termed as point-to-point links at a very high level.

The network devices that are most commonly used are as follows:

• NIC
• Modem
• Hub
• Switch
• Router and
• Repeater