Ground Floor Customer Service and Marketing Department

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Ground Floor: Customer Service and Marketing Department

There are a total of 20 workstations.
There are two network printers accessible by all workstations.
The Internet is accessible by all workstations.
Visitors should be able to access to the wireless internet access, wifi.

The network topology best suited for the ground floor is the star topology. A star topology is one where by each work station or computer peripheral are centrally connected by use of a computer/hub or switch.

In this way, when one connection of the network is not working or faulty, it does not affect the rest of the work stations in the network. This is a big advantage in this type of network.

Fig 1.0

However, they are other network topologies that can be utilized like the bus, ring, hybrid and mesh topologies. They have their own draw backs that make them inefficient. For example the bus topology, when there is a break at any point in the ring network, the entire network fails.

Fig 1.0 represents a generic star topology with one broken connection. Though the connection to that particular computer is broken, the network still operates.
Since this computer network is interconnected exclusively within itself, it can be referred to as a Local Area Network.

At this point, the definition of a hub is imperative. Quite simply, a hub is a small inexpensive device that joins computers together. Most hubs today use the Ethernet Standard and others the USB standard.

The Hub represents layer one and two in the OSI model, also know as the Open Systems Interconnection reference model seen below.

Fig 1.3 OSI model

To network/co...

... middle of paper ...

...cable from either computer and connecting them to the network router. By doing this the printer's are connected to the LAN.

To make sure the print out do not get mixed up, workstations 1-10 use the first printer called Printer A, and the rest of the workstations use printer B.

References. http://compnetworking.about.com/od/ethernet/f/what-is-an-ethernet-cable.htm http://compnetworking.about.com/od/networkprotocols/ http://compnetworking.about.com/od/networkdesign/ig/Computer-Network-Topologies/ compnetworking.about.com/od/speedtests/a/network-speed.htm http://compnetworking.about.com/od/ethernet/g/cat5-cables.htm http://www.amazon.com/Netgear-EN524-24-Port-Ethernet-Hub/dp/B00004Z8AI http://compnetworking.about.com/od/hardwarenetworkgear/a/how-to-network-a-printer.htm http://www.amazon.com/Dynex-DX-E402-4-Port-Ethernet-Broadband/dp/B0013BI7JQ

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