Aditya Abeysinghe Networking

The problem with general communication methods- Businesses had to historically dedicate on leased dedicated circuits such as T1, ISDN and OC3. Although these methods provide reliable private secure methods, these lines are expensive and often rise in cost as the distance between offices increase. Fig 1 : Leased lines What is VPN? VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) are type of point-to-point connections across a private or public network. VPNs use a tunneling process to secure data while transferring data through insecure medium like the internet.&nbsp When a message to be sent is composed and submitted for sending through an insecure medium, a virtual envelope is created around the data, thus securing what is inside the message from the outsiders. Then a virtual tunnel is created for routing between different ports by which the message is sent across. See figure below for more details. Tunneling- The process- Tunneling is the process o...

What is a network access point? Network access points are places which provide access to national and global networking traffic. Remember that network access point was an access method that was widely used before they were replaced by Internet Exchange Points (IXP s). Why need network access points? Think that you want to send some data to a friend who is living about 500km away from you. How would you send the data to your friend. How can you connect to the friend and vice versa? The most common method to do this is to connect to your ISP (Internet Service Provider) and send the data and on the receiving end the friend can receive the data from the same ISP or from a different ISP. If you are on one network and the friend is on another network (two different ISP s) how can you connect? That is where you need network access points. Network access points, as mentioned earlier in this blog post, are places which provide access to national and global networ...