Putting It All Together

Now, back to the network discussion. When computers are connected to a LAN, they are physically connected to each other, which is the basis for their association to that LAN.

With a wireless LAN, the computers have to find a way to connect, or associate, themselves to the LAN, because they are not physically connected. The way they do this is by tuning themselves to the wireless router using the name of the router (the wireless router’s name is called the Service Set Identification number, or SSID). When you tell your computer to connect to an access point, the computer tunes to the access point’s frequency and asks permission to join the LAN. If the access point is open, any computer asking to join the LAN will be allowed to do so. If the LAN has encryption security enabled, the computer needs to know the encryption key to even ask permission to join.