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What is a network?

Strip away the acronyms and a network is three things: hosts that want to talk (laptops, servers, phones), links that carry signals between them (copper, fibre, radio), and protocols, agreed rules for what the signals mean. Every technology in this curriculum is just one of those three ideas wearing a uniform.

two hosts, one link, one protocol

When two devices exchange a file over Wi-Fi, the same thing happens as when two data centres sync across an ocean: bits are framed, addressed, routed and acknowledged. Scale changes; the ideas don’t.