From the course: Networking Foundations: Networking Basics

Network interface cards

From the course: Networking Foundations: Networking Basics

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Network interface cards

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- If we have a PC that wants to communicate on our network, it needs to have some sort of circuitry that will allow us to send and receive data on either a wired or wireless network. Now that circuitry is found in a network interface card or NIC for short. Some PCs and laptops and other network devices they have NIC functionality built into the motherboard of the device. So we don't necessarily have to have a separate NIC, however, in many cases we might need to add either an internal NIC or an external NIC. Here, we see an internal NIC that could be inserted into an available slot in our PC, then we can plug in our ethernet cable to get connected to the wired network. And even though this connects us to a wired network, we can also have NICs that connect us to the wireless network. We might alternately have an external NIC, like we see here. This is the actual external NIC I use for my laptop when I want to connect to a wired network. The reason is my laptop has wireless NIC functionality built in, but it doesn't have an ethernet port to get me connected into a wired network. That's where this external NIC comes in. I plug this external NIC into one of the USB Type-C ports on my laptop, and then I'm ready to connect to a wired network.

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