The guide names wired, wireless and cloud. They are not three options you pick between. Almost every connection you make uses all three, one after another.
Opening one file, hop by hop: wireless, then wired, then a machine in a data centre.
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The internet feels wireless because the part you touch is. The rest is physical: around 99% of international traffic runs through cables on the sea floor.
Wired
- Fast, stable, hard to intercept in the middle
- Expensive to lay and slow to change
- Follows political geography — cables need landing points
- A single break can slow a whole country
Wireless
- Cheap to reach people the cable never got to
- Shared, so it slows when everyone is using it
- Easier to intercept and easier to jam
- Reaches places laying cable never would
Why this matters for the divide: Mobile networks connected populations that fixed lines never did. That is why connection figures rose so fast, and why the remaining gaps are about quality and cost rather than coverage.
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Cloud computing means renting computing instead of owning it. It is genuinely transformative and it moves two things you used to control.
What renting moves
- Your data into a building you do not own.
- The law that applies to wherever that building is.
- Whether the service exists tomorrow to a company's decision.
- The power bill somewhere you cannot see it.
Real-world examples you can name
Starlink satellite internet in Ukraine — from February 2022
Low-earth-orbit satellite terminals restored connectivity where ground infrastructure had been destroyed. Because coverage decisions rested with a single private company, they also became decisions about the conduct of a war.
Who it affected: Ukrainian civilians and military units relying on the link.
Bitcoin and the public blockchain — network live January 2009
A currency with no issuing bank, kept honest by a shared append-only ledger that thousands of computers verify. The proof-of-work method that secures it consumes electricity on the scale of a mid-sized country.
Who it affected: Holders and traders, people in countries with unstable currencies, and everyone affected by the energy used.
How this is tested — you have to name the type of network in a scenario and explain what follows from that choice. It comes up two ways:
Paper 1 — structured question
- Part a: identify types of network in a described system
- Part b: explain why a described organization uses the cloud
Paper 2 — source-based question
- Q1: read a network detail off a source
- Q2: explain a claim a source makes about connectivity
The trap: “the internet is wireless”: The part you touch is wireless. Nearly all of the distance is cable, and saying so is often worth a mark on its own.
Identify two types of computing network.
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Explain one reason why a small organization might use cloud computing rather than its own servers.
Model answer plan
See the mark-by-mark plan — for / against / judgement, with marking guidance — in study mode.