Networking 101 for Security Installers and Integrators

Webinar

Id like to welcome everybody here to the Supercircuits Networking 101 Webinar. Well let
everybody join and then well get started momentarily. Before we get started I wanted to cover a
few things.

Training Goal: Helping You Have an Understanding of IP
The goal of the training is to help you have an understanding of IP. What weve realized and what
we think is happening is a lot of our dealers are analog experts, but they dont really know that
much about IP. Hopefully, when Im finished with this webinar, youll be educated enough to talk to
your customers and hopefully allow you to sell more IP products.

Whats a Network?
What were going to cover now is basic IP 101. Were going to start out with: Whats a network?
Everybody hears the word network thrown around pretty loosely, but a lot of people dont really
know what one is. A network is two or more devices, that are connected together that share
hardware and software.

They usually share the same topology and protocols. Below is a good representation of an IP
camera network. Youll see that our DIGIOP IP cameras are cabled into a switch, it also shows the
video network recorder. From there youll see the client work station and router, everything pulled
together.

Local Area Network
On this network, youll see that it goes into the internet and it shows smart phones connecting to it,
as well as a remote work station. Next were going to talk about Local Area Networks. A Local Area
Network is called a LAN. Everybody says, Well what do you have on your LAN? Are you going to
create your own LAN? And a lot of people, especially dealers that are experts in analog but
havent really put in IP systems, they dont really know what one is.

So I want to educate you on what a LAN is. A LAN is a Local Area Network. It is called a LAN
because of the way its set up. LAN topologies include bus, star and ring. Most everybody is going
to be set up on a star topology. If you look below, Ive got a star topology set up on a LAN. Its
several computers set up that way. What I would like to really emphasize is that 95% of every
topology on a LAN is a star topology. Youll want to use a star topology because if one computer or
device drops off, you will not lose your network.

Wide Area Networks
Next, Im going to cover Wide Area Networks, also called WANs . Whats cool about a Wide Area
Network, is it allows you connect two remote locations via a leased line, and treat it like one big
LAN or a WAN.

Im going to give you a good example. Imagine if you had your business in Dallas, and then its set
up with its own LAN, and you have your business in Houston and its set up with its own LAN. Well
you want to keep the two connected continually. Well, what youre going to do, youd lease a line
form Cox, or youd lease a fiber line from Time-Warner, and youd have direct connectivity
continuously between the two buildings, and thats how you create a WAN.

Your Backbone in Your Network
Your backbone in your network is really the connecting cables between floors, or between areas in
a building. Most of the time, when people talk about the backbone, theyre going to say, Well, did
you have a gigabit backbone?

Theyre really wanting to know about how robust your infrastructure is. On my diagram below, to
help you have a visual representation of what a backbone is, Ive got a 3-floor building. Between
each floor is your backbone. That could be fiber, or it could be gigabit CAT-5E or a gigabit CAT-6,
connecting into each router. Backbones are very important.

You usually dont want to run a weak or a narrow bandwidth backbone. And Ill get into more into
that in a minute. Next, Im going to talk about network technologies. I just wanted to bring this up
for an education or backdrop information.

IEEE the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers was established in 1980. This institute
developed the set of standards called the 802 project. Its pretty crucial when you start thinking
about protocols and how things work together. The 802 projects, you have the 802.3, which was for
IBM, and then it rolls onto 802.11 which is what youre going to hear the most of.


802.11 refers to the wireless standards that your laptops or cameras can communicate on. Within
the 802.11, there are 3 commonly used wireless standards or networks: 802.11b, g, and n. B came
out in the 1990s. It was 11 megabits on the 2.4 GHz frequency. Shortly after, g came out, which
allowed you to move up to 54 megabits on the same 2.4 GHz frequencies.

And then, most here recently, n came out. Whats nice about n is it runs on the 5.8 GHz, so theres
not nearly as much interference, and you have a 300 megabit bandwidth. I recently hooked up a
802.11n router in my house, giving me up to 300 megabits in connectivity. Now my choke point is
literally where it hooks into my modem. In my neighborhood you can only get 26 megabits down.
So Ive covered topologies and LANs and WANs and backbones. Now I want to get into some of
the harder aspects of what networks and how all the items work together.

Cabling
Were going to start with cable categories. You really have category 3, category 5, category 5e,
category 6 cable. Theyre all very similar. They all represent data transmission, but the speeds vary
between them. Really, when you start talking about a twisted pair cable, the tighter the twist, the
faster the cables can talk to each other.

Below, youll see the category 3 cable, and you can see how the pairs are not really twisted
together very tightly, and then, right above it, youll see the category 5 cable and youll see that the
twists are a lot tighter. Category 5 can move faster speeds than category 3.

To help you understand this, under the category cables and the cable standards is speed, length,
and cable type. So, a 10 megabit or a 10 T cable, which is CAT-3, can do 10 megabits per second
and can run for 100 meters. 100 T cable, which is category 5 cable can do 100 megabits and its
still limited to 100 meters of distance it can run.

And then, finally, you have your category 5e, or CAT-6 cable, and it is a gigabit cable, and it can
also still go 100 meters. Wondering why I keep saying the 100 meters part? I want to emphasize,
when youre running IP, the maximum distance that you can run it before you have to do an
extender or a power injector is 328 feet or 100 meters. Unlike analog cameras, where you can do
from 100 feet, and if you do an injector you can do 1,000 feet. Cable standards, within the IP world,
is 328 feet.


There are actually several type of category or UTP cable grades. You have CAT-3, which is our 10
megabit that I just spoke about. You have CAT-4, it was really only used during token-ring
topologies, and it was a 16 megabit. Its fallen out of favor, along with CAT-3.

Then you have CAT-5, which is 100 megabit, and then you have CAT-5e and CAT-6, which is
gigabit. I often get asked, Whats the difference between CAT-5e and CAT-6? Theyre both
gigabit. Well, CAT-6 is a thicker copper and has a middle riser that separates the cables as it
twists down the main shielded cable.

Whereas CAT-5e is wound tighter and then it winds upon itself. Both of them are gigabit. Its up to
you on what you want to install. CAT-5e is a little bit cheaper, so most people tend to gravitate
toward it. I personally like putting in CAT-5e over CAT-6. Not because of cost, but because I can
put the CAT-5e RJ-45 connector on three times as fast as I can a CAT-6. That little riser, for
whatever reason, for better or worse, gives me fits when Im trying to cut it out and move quickly.

What is Bandwidth?
Originally, we were talking about backbones and how you wanted to have a robust backbone. Well
that had to do with bandwidth. Bandwidth is defined as either channel capacity or maximum
throughput on your network.

When I think of bandwidth, I often give an analogy of, imagine going to work from your house, and
between your house and your work, you go down this main interstate or thoroughfare. When
schools in session and early in the morning, theres a lot traffic.

So you have what I always consider low bandwidth, because youre not able to go your maximum
speed that you would want to go, because there are all the other cars around you. Same thing
applies if you had CAT-3 cable and you only had 10 megabits of bandwidth, but yet you wanted to
send 16 megabits worth of data. It takes longer to get that transmitted.

However, imagine going to work on a Saturday to pick up your laptop or your wallet that you left at
your desk. You leave early Saturday or Sunday morning, theres no traffic, youre able to go the
maximum speed you want to go and get there twice as fast. Well thats what happens when you
use a gigabit cable or fiber. You open up the bandwidth, and then its how fast can you transmit that
data how fast can you move it.

When I was talking about cable standards and cable in general, I mentioned RJ-45. I want to show
you a visual representation of an RJ-11 standard phone jack connector, and an RJ-45, a common
Ethernet cable connector. If you look below, they both look like phone jacks. The RJ-11 is your
standard phone jack, thats been around for 100 years. Then the RJ-45 is your network connector.
It is just an over-sized looking phone jack.

Along with cable standards, I want to address the difference between a patch cable and a
crossover cable. A patch cable is just a shorter cable version of what youre going to run in your
network when youre connecting cameras to the switch. Patch cables, if you want to test a camera,
require you to plug the patch cable from your laptop into a switch and then get another patch cable
and plug it into the device you want to test. Its important to know how they are set up. The ends
are plugged in; wired in just as if youre doing big runs.

Crossover cables, however, allow you to test stuff on the fly. Basically the pins are reversed on
each end from each other, and it allows you to plug from a laptop directly into an IP device and get
connectivity. I suggest you keep a crossover cable in your bag, or on your truck so that when
youre in the field, in case youre having problems installing something.

The crossover cable helps you quickly identify whats going on. It allows you to log directly into
your IP device. It doesnt require you to have a switch or anything like that. Its pretty important that
you have these with you for testing purposes and itll allow to then make your install quicker.
So we covered what LAN, WANs were, we talked about networks, network standards, along with
different types of cable. I want to get into some more hardware components and really start talking
about network components. Hubs, switches, and routers; and I want to identify the differences
between them.

Hubs
A hub is a device with multiple ports which has several cameras hooked to it, or several computers.
People often get hubs and switches confused. Hubs are the original switch, so to speak. There are
some limitations with hubs. They have no real intelligence on moving data between two devices
quicker. Hubs also share total network bandwidth, so if you have a 100 megabit hub, and you have
8 items plugged into that hub, they have a maximum bandwidth of 100 megabits that they can
share between them.

Switches
Switches generally have some intelligence built into them. We call them smart switches. It really
increases efficiency of data transmissions. Whats nice about a switch, and what separates it from
a hub is you have a maximum bandwidth per channel, so if you have a gigabit switch, you have a
gigabit per channel that you can push data through. This makes it a lot better than a hub. The price
between hubs and switches are really close, so everybody usually uses a switch or smart switch.

Routers
Routers allow you to speak to different networks in the building or in the world. For example, if you
have a network set up in your house a LAN everything on that LAN can talk to each other. But
when your LAN or a computer on your LAN wants to talk to the Internet, to a computer in a
different state or a different country, you have to use your router to transmit that data up and out,
and it manages that.

Along with talking about network components, I want to talk about MAC addresses and what is a
MAC address. Youll hear that term thrown around loosely. A MAC address, which is a Media
Access Control, is referred the physical address that is set up onto the NIC card or on each device.
Think of them like social security numbers. Nobody has the same social security number in
America. The same thing goes for MAC addresses. No one has the same MAC address on any of
their devices. This allows you to locate devices on a network quickly and easily.

Differences in Protocols
There are two basic protocols used in the world today, TCP/IP and UDP. Most, if not all, IP
cameras use UDP protocols. For better or worse, they allow you to transmit live data quicker, and
Im going to explain that.

UDP protocols allow you to transmit data packets. Whats nice about UDP protocols is they do not
require a packet to check and make sure that your other device has received the data. So they can
spool out a lot of data really fast and then they move on to the next task.

In the case of an IP camera, its just going to start spooling out data. It doesnt need to check and
make sure that you got the data, its just going to keep feeding it in a live fashion. If you get it,
great. If you dont, thats unfortunate.


TCP/IP was developed in the US in the 1970s for ARPNET. It was really set up to make stuff
scalable and more reliable. TCP sends out large amounts of data, and then every so often itll send
out a message asking if you got all the data packets.

It then waits for a response from the computer its sending the information to, and if the computer
thats receiving it says, Yes, Ive got everything, then its going to continue sending the data until
its done with its task. If the computer on the other end sends back a message saying, Im missing
data packet 3 of 100, then it knows, Hey let me resend data packet 3. It keeps all your programs
complete and whole.

A lot of people dont always grasp the difference between TCP versus UDP. Imagine a post office;
you have several different ways of mailing items in the post office, but imagine you can send a
letter registered. Thats just like TCP. You send it registered. The postman delivers it, he requires a
signature. He sends that signed piece of paper back to me that lets me know that my mail made it
to the recipient.

UDP, on the other hand, is like sending postcards out for Christmas. Im going to send 100
postcards out to 100 people, and if they get them, they get them and if they dont, they dont. I
dont really want to spend too much time thinking about it, its just about ease of use, and getting it
out there.

IP Addresses
IP addresses are required for TCP/IP communication. IP addresses must be unique on each
network on a LAN or WAN. You do not want to choose your IP addresses randomly, you will want
to follow a method. If 192.168.1.1 is your base IP address on your LAN, then you will want to go up
in a systematic order as you add devices. Other parameters around TCP/IP are sub-net mask,
default gateway, and DNS servers. As we talk about these, I want to show you where you would
set them up on a computer.

On cameras, its going to be similar. On a computer, if you were to hit your start button, go into the
control panel, and then click Networking, about the 4th or 5th option down on your Windows
Networking Connection Properties is something called Internet Protocol version 4, TCP/IP V4.



Click the properties on that and to the right of it a box will appear. You can see how you have your
IP address, your sub-net mask, and your default gateway. Thats where you set everything up and
each computer and each camera needs to be independent and different from each other.

I often get that question: What is a sub-net mask and how does it apply to me? Basically a sub-
net mask is a 32-bit binary number system. Really what people need to take away from What is a
sub-net mask? is it allows you to know how many routers you need to talk between networks.

Im going to give you some examples. You have 3 classes of sub-net masks. Class A, class B, and
class C. Class C is what 95% of us are going to use, 255.255.255.0. When you set up that sub-net
mask, that means that on my network of computers that can talk to each other, Im going to have
255 possible combinations including my base 1. So that means I can put 255 cameras on a
network or I can put 255 devices on a network.

Class B allows you to scale up into a larger infrastructure system. It allows you to put 65,000
different IP addresses on one network and they can talk between each other before you need a
router. Class A actually takes it up from there and allows you to do up to 17 million possible
combinations before you need a router.

Most everybody is going to use Class C. When we start talking about IP addresses, and the range
of addresses that people are going to use. I wanted to kind of talk to that as well. You have Class
A, Class B, and Class C. About 95% of yall are going to use 192.168.something for setting up your
networks. If you see a 172, thats if theres a secondary network in your LAN, so you have a couple
of LANs in an area or in a building. The 10 networks are generally going to be your commercial
grade networks, set up by a CISCO IT director. So, most everybody, youre going to do 192.168. In
the next couple of trainings, were going to dig into that even more, to help you understand how to
set up stuff on a network, and hopefully that will answer a lot of your questions moving forward.

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)
Everybody doesnt say it in full, what they say is DHCP. Whats nice about a DHCP protocol is that
you dont have to set anything up. Itll just reach out and ask the router or smart switch, Who am I,
and what IP address can I use? It automatically identifies that based off the information given from
the router or smart switch, and then it gets its own IP address.


Then its automatically on the LAN and youre talking to it. I want to talk about ping characteristics,
which ties into TCP/IP. To ping something is to test the connectivity between two devices on your
LAN. This is really important to know. If you go to your start menu and go into the command
prompt and type ping plus an IP address, you would see if it is live and working. If you were to type
in ping, space, and then an IP address, like 192.168.2.10, the following information would roll out.
What you want to see is that you have 0 data packets lost, and that you know everything was
received, so that means youre having connectivity between 2 devices. If you do not get that, if you
get a timed out, timed out, timed out, several times in a row, listed right one after the other, that
means that, if youre trying to ping a camera to see why the cameras not coming up, either the
camera is not plugged in, the camera doesnt have the right IP address, it may not have the right
sub-net, it may not have the right gateway.

Or you may have the connectors wrong, I mean, you could have the pin out in your cable wrong.
Also, please note, if youre going to be installing gear, I always suggest having a cable tester, that
allows you plug into each cable as you terminate it and make sure that the pin out is correct and
youre getting connectivity down the cable.

DNS Characteristics
DNS defines things in a hierarchical name space for computer networks. When you think of DNS
characteristics, what does that mean to you? Well, in laymans terms, you will hear me talking
about an IP address, 192.168.whatever.whatever. If you were to call me and say, Hey, I want to go
to your website. And I said, Great. And so, instead of directing you to Supercircuits.com, what if I
told you needed to go to 72.374.whatever.whatever. Numbers are really hard to memorize. For that
reason, they really came out with the DNS characteristics and it allows you to attach names versus
numbers, to get to an address.

Below, you can see my photo representation, like Microsoft.com. When you type in a name, it
points to a numeric IP address and directs the person to that site. Next, Id like to cover the
differences between dynamic IP address versus static IP address. Your Internet Service Provider,
or ISP, can either give you a dynamic IP address or a static IP address. Dynamic IP addresses
change, theyre dynamic, they do not stay the same. They change based off of the ISP and their
protocols. You could have a dynamic IP address that changes every 5 minutes or it could change
every 5 days. We really dont know.


Static IP addresses are different. They never change and theyre something that you have to get
assigned to you from your ISP, and they generally make you pay for it. If youre lucky, they will not,
but 9 out 10 ISPs charge you $10-50 a month, usually towards the higher side.

They usually tell you they have to get a commercial cable connection to get a static IP address.
How to manage dynamic IP addresses without paying for a static, its pretty simple to explain here.
One of the hardest things that youre going to explain to your customer, however, is, after you sell
them the gear, after you charge them for the labor for the install, youre now going to make them
pay their ISP for a static IP address.

Again, this varies from really $10 to $50 a month. It generally ranges between $30 and $50. One of
the benefits we can help you here, is a DNS server. Its something we provide to our dealers at no
additional charge. A DNS server, for your understanding, allows you to set a name IP address, and
then it keeps up with the numeric IP address as it changes.

So, imagine, you set up BobsHomeDVR.com, well our DNS server or any DNS server says, Okay,
BobsHomeDVR.com has this numeric IP address, and then its going to check, and then any time
that changes, its going to update it. So when you come in and you type in
www.BobsHomeDVR.com, it goes to the DNS server and says, Hey, whats my current numeric IP
address. The DNS server responds with, Heres your proper address, and it directs you to the
site. We provide this server, this cost for free.

There are several online sites that do this and they generally charge around $39 a year. Its still
cheaper than doing the monthly deal from your ISP provider. What I know most of my dealers are
doing now is, since they are managing or charging to watch their burglar system, you know $14.99
$24.99 a month. What theyll do is theyll also add, for RMR, theyll add a $5 up-charge to do
their DNS server. They explain what theyre going to do for them.

We actually do not charge anything to our dealers for this service, and then they get to charge
RMR. They manage it on their end. We actually teach the dealer how to log on, how to set
everything up, how to manage it. Its pretty simple. Next training, well actually cover that in detail.
I want to close on terms applied to our industry, just to help wrap things up. Weve covered
infrastructure, setups, LANs, WANs and then we covered components such as CAT-5 cable and
hardware such as switches and hubs, and then we rolled into IP addresses and MAC addresses.

Terms and Gear-based Information in our Industry
Pixels versus megapixels. Pixels are used as a unit of measure. In our industry, it is a measure of
resolution, such as 2400 pixels per square inch. Mega refers to 1 million. Therefore, if you have a 2
megapixel camera, you really have a 2 million pixel camera, or right at a 1080p camera.

DVR versus NVR. In the analog world, DVRs have been around for almost a decade. DVRs are
Digital Video Recorders. A DVR takes analog cameras, converts the analog signal over to a digital
signal, and records it to a hard drive. Most DVRs are networkable, and people then get that
confused with an NVR. NVRs do not take in analog signals. They are going to take in IP signals
from the beginning. So, you can take an IP signal in, it records it to the hard drive. It is also
networkable and can be viewed anywhere in the world.

What separates most DVRs to NVRs are IP cameras. The lowest resolution of an IP camera is the
highest resolution of a DVR. So your NVR is going to be able to record standard analog, D1, which
is a low resolution for IP cameras, all the way up to 5 megapixels or 10 megapixels. NVRs are
where everybody is moving towards. It allows you to have the CSI moments, where you can zoom
in after the fact, from recorded video and get that facial shot, of the guy breaking into the house
and stuff like that.

That concludes everything that I wanted to talk about today. Please let me know any questions,
and we will go from there.












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