The Network · Workshop 06 · Practice
How Networks Are Shaped
Five steps. About 25 minutes. Up to 7 stars. The constellation you're building is called First Topology.
The Network · Workshop 06 · Practice
Five steps. About 25 minutes. Up to 7 stars. The constellation you're building is called First Topology.
Every network has a shape — not because it's pretty, but because the shape decides what survives when something breaks.
Star: all devices connect to one central hub. Easy to manage, but if the hub dies the whole network dies. Most home WiFi is a star.
Ring: each device connects to the next in a loop. The signal passes around the ring. Old office networks used this; modern fiber backbones still do for redundancy.
Mesh: every device connects to many others. Survives almost anything — lose a device and the data routes around it. The internet itself is a mesh of meshes.
By the end of this workshop you'll have drawn one network topology and named one thing it survives well and one thing it survives poorly.
That's the warm-up. When you've actually read it — not skimmed — tap below.
Pick the topologies that match what's described.
Click a topology, then its strength.
Map the devices on your home (or school) network. Name them. Then describe the shape (star? mesh? something mixed?) and one weakness.
Stuck? List: home router, my phone, my laptop, the smart TV, the smart speaker. Most are connected through the home router. That's a star. Weakness: if the home router dies, everything else loses internet.
One sentence.