GCSE Computing/Computer Communications and Networking

What you need to know Networks (a) explain the advantages of networking stand-alone computers into a local area network (b) describe the hardware needed to connect stand-alone computers into a local area network, including hubs and switches and wireless access points (c) explain the different Client Server and Peer to Peer roles of computers in a client-server and a peer-to-peer network (d) describe, using diagrams or otherwise, the ring, bus and star network topologies (e) describe the differences between a local area network and a wide area network such as the Internet (f) explain the terms IP addressing, MAC addressing, packet and protocols (g) explain the need for security measures in networks, such as user access levels, suitable passwords and encryption techniques (h) describe and justify network policies such as acceptable use, disaster recovery, failover, back up, archiving. The Internet (i) describe the nature of the Internet as a worldwide collection of computer networks (j) describe the hardware needed to connect to the Internet including modems, routers etc (k) explain the need for IP addressing of resources on the Internet and how this can be facilitated by the role of DNS servers (l) explain the importance of HTML and its derivatives as a standard for the creation of web pages (m) describe common file standards associated with the Internet such as JPG, GIF, PDF, MP3, MPEG (n) explain the importance of compressing files that are transmitted via the Internet (o) describe the differences between lossy and lossless compression