I believe what you are asking is can a VPN provide the same level of access to a Wirelesss Local network as if you were you were able to communicate with the hotspots at the remote location.
The simple answer is only if the remote location also has a VPN server that you have VPN software for. I am going to review a few networking terms below that might help you understand. in the below definitions internet is in lower case unless it is preceded by the word: "the" network: a group of computers that are connected together to allow them to access each other. hub: a device to connect computers together in a network. Multiple hubs can be connected together to create a larger network. switch: This is essentially a hub but has some more advanced software to allow quicker communication between systems. Hub, switch, access point, hot spot all essentially provide the same service at this level. internet: (with a lower case i) This is a group of at least two networks connected together. router: The device used to connect two networks together. client: a computer asking for a service on the network. This can be either at the machine level or the software level. So you could call your Macintosh a client or you could call Firefox a client. But Apache web server is not a client. Server: What a client talks to to get information this can be local, or remote. There are also cloud based servers which means that multiple machines could serve a clients request equally well. peer-to-peer: Sometimes there is no obvious client and server (bit torrent is the best known protocol for this) so a server one minute could become a client the next. Now we get to VPN. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network, but these days that is not the only function that VPN technology provides. A VPN can make either a computer or network behave as though it is part of another network. The original use was lets say company My Toys has offices in Chicago, Atlanta, and Sanfrancisco. Before the internet to have these offices communicate one would purchase two or three private digital connections between the sites ab $500 to $1000. Now when the three sites connected to the Internet it was realized that the offices could communicate with each other over the Internet but there was no way to verify that nobody saw that communication. So on the routers if traffic was going from San Francisco to Atlanta the router connecting the Sanfancisco office to the Internet grabs the data encrypts it and sends the results to the router connecting the Atlanta office to the Internet. rather than the destination. The Atlanta router would then decrypt the information and send it to the final destination within the Atlanta network. Now this technology is also used for: 1. Preventing snooping of traffic on insecure hotspots. 2. Pretending you are browsing the web from a different city then where you really are. 3. Providing telephone and private server access for remote users. . HTH Jonathan Cohn -- The following information is important for all members of the Mac Visionaries list. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. Your Mac Visionaries list moderator is Mark Taylor. You can reach mark at: [email protected] and your owner is Cara Quinn - you can reach Cara at [email protected] The archives for this list can be searched at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
