Computer Networking
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50 free Computer Networking trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every message, video call and web page depends on computer networking, a field built from a handful of clever ideas: break data into packets, give every machine an identity, and agree on rules for passing things along. The details are packed with surprises, from standards that began as jokes to inventions by people you would never expect. This quiz covers the ground a basic networking course would: hardware and wiring, addressing, the layered models, everyday protocols, wireless standards and security. It also digs into the history, from the research networks of the 1960s to the people and companies behind the standards still in use. It suits IT students revising for an exam, help-desk and sysadmin staff who want a quick check of the fundamentals, and anyone curious about how the Internet works. Each question comes with a short explanation, so you learn something whether or not you get it right.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which short-range wireless technology is named after a tenth-century Danish king who united warring tribes?
Bluetooth
Bluetooth borrows the nickname of King Harald, and its logo merges the runes for his initials. Intel's Jim Kardach proposed the name in 1997 because the technology was meant to unite devices too.
Q 02Which Hollywood actress co-invented a frequency-hopping radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes in the early 1940s?
Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr devised it with composer George Antheil, but the US Navy rejected the idea as too bulky for a torpedo. Related spread-spectrum principles now run through modern wireless links.
Q 03Which kitchen appliance works at roughly 2.45 GHz, the same band as many Wi-Fi networks, and can disrupt them?
Microwave oven
A microwave oven leaks a little energy around 2.45 GHz, harmless to people but enough to disrupt Wi-Fi at close range. That band was chosen because it is open for unlicensed use worldwide.
Q 04Which birds carry the data in RFC 1149, a 1990 April Fools' networking standard later tested for real in Norway?
Pigeons
Pigeons delivered nine packets across about five kilometres when a Bergen Linux group tried it in 2001. Only four replies came back, the fastest after 50 minutes.
Q 05What carries nearly all international Internet traffic, with capacity measured in terabits per second?
Submarine cables
Submarine cables win because satellites carry only a very small percentage of international traffic. Sharks have even been recorded biting the lines.
Q 06Which device, essential for dial-up Internet access, turns digital data into signals a telephone line can carry?
Modem
Modem is short for modulator-demodulator, since it reverses the conversion for incoming signals. In the 1990s tens of millions of Americans went online with one.
Q 07Which security system, a term networking adopted in the 1980s, filters traffic entering and leaving a private network?
Firewall
Firewall first meant a wall that confines a blaze within a row of adjoining buildings. Before dedicated products existed, routers did the filtering.
Q 08Which command, written by Mike Muuss in 1983, tests whether a remote computer is reachable and times the reply?
Ping
Ping is named after the pulse of sound that sonar sends out, because the tool likewise waits for an echo from the other machine.
Q 09Which pioneering US network carried the message 'lo' in 1969 after crashing midway through the word 'login'?
ARPANET
ARPANET's first link ran from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute, and the full word got through about an hour later.
Q 10Which cable design, still used for Ethernet, did Alexander Graham Bell invent in 1881 to cut telephone interference?
Twisted pair
Twisted pair keeps both wires the same average distance from a noise source, so interference hits them equally and can be cancelled at the receiver.
Q 11Which technology uses encryption and tunnelling to carry an office's internal traffic across the public Internet?
VPN
VPN stands for virtual private network, and its split-tunnelling mode lets a laptop reach office systems and ordinary websites at the same time.
Q 12Which network architecture, popularised by Napster in 1999, has computers share files directly with one another?
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer contrasts with the client–server model, where central machines supply everything. Many such systems still keep one central server to help users find each other.
Q 13Which term for the delay before data arrives, measured in milliseconds, do online gamers experience as 'lag'?
Latency
Q 21Which Internet addressing scheme writes each 128-bit address as eight groups of hexadecimal digits separated by colons?
IPv6
IPv6 was developed because the older scheme's 32-bit addresses were running out. Its own supply runs to about 340 undecillion.
Q 22Which type of address, 48 bits long and usually assigned by the manufacturer, is burned into a network card?
MAC
MAC is short for medium access control, and each address typically carries a code that identifies the company that made the hardware.
Q 23Which protocol automatically assigns IP addresses to devices joining a network, in four stages nicknamed DORA?
DHCP
DHCP hands out each address as a lease with a time limit, so the server can reclaim any that are not renewed and give them to other devices.
Latency rises with distance, since data sent farther needs more transmission and routing. In online games, lag turns severe once round trips pass about 100 milliseconds.
Q 14Which type of network, often built on leased lines, spans cities or countries and counts the Internet as an example?
WAN
WAN stands for wide area network, and a router at each end of a leased line typically joins one office's local network to another's.
Q 15Which network topology, one of the most common, connects every host to a single central device?
Star
Star wiring means a broken cable cuts off only one host, though the central device becomes a single point of failure for everyone.
Q 16Which web protocol uses port 443 by default and has been used more often than its older sibling since 2018?
HTTPS
HTTPS keeps browsing private and proves a page is authentic, while its older sibling sends everything unencrypted on port 80.
Q 17Which system, often called the phone book of the Internet, translates names like example.com into numeric IP addresses?
DNS
DNS, created by Paul Mockapetris in 1983, replaced a single text file called HOSTS.TXT that mapped every host name to its address.
Q 18Which short-range radio technology, limited to a few centimetres, lets a phone make contactless payments with a tap?
NFC
NFC needs such close contact that signals are hard to intercept in a crowd, yet the plain standard itself has no protection against eavesdropping.
Q 19Which attack floods a victim with traffic from many different sources at once, typically a botnet of hijacked machines?
DDoS
DDoS stands for distributed denial of service, and a 2021 attack through the Mirai botnet peaked at 17.2 million requests per second.
Q 20Which networking giant, founded by two Stanford computer scientists in 1984, has a logo based on the Golden Gate Bridge?
Cisco
Cisco took its name from San Francisco, which is why its engineers insisted on writing a lower-case 'cisco' in the early years.
Q 24Which core Internet protocol opens every connection with a three-way handshake of SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK?
TCP
TCP guarantees that every byte arrives intact and in order, which costs time, so applications that prize speed over reliability use UDP instead.
Q 25Which protocol, first specified in 1971, opens its control channel on port 21 and often accepts 'anonymous' logins?
FTP
FTP sends its sign-in as plain text, so usernames and passwords cross the network unencrypted, and each file travels over a separate data connection.
Q 26Which protocol, published by Jon Postel in the early 1980s, carries email between mail servers on port 25?
SMTP
SMTP only sends: mail apps typically submit outgoing messages on port 465 or 587 and rely on other protocols to retrieve the inbox.
Q 27Which technique hides many private IP addresses behind a single public one, easing the shortage of IPv4 addresses?
NAT
NAT was once nicknamed IP masquerading, because a whole network of devices appears to the outside world as a single machine.
Q 28Which device learns the address of each connected machine and forwards data only to the right port, unlike a hub?
Switch
A switch gives every port its own collision domain, whereas a hub blindly repeats each packet out of all its other ports.
Q 29Which lowest layer of the seven-layer OSI model specifies cables, connectors and the transmission of raw bits?
Physical
Physical is layer 1, where the standard fixes details as basic as connector shapes, signal levels and maximum cable lengths.
Q 30Which kind of network uses Internet technology but is generally restricted to the employees of one organisation?
Intranet
An intranet stops at the staff, whereas an extranet also lets in customers, suppliers or other approved outsiders.