A computer network is an essential element of modern business, and it's increasingly indispensable in the home, too. A network lets your computer connect to the Web so that you can check e-mail, update a website, or teleconference. It also lets you communicate locally with other computers on the same local network. Creating a network is simple—all that's needed is to connect a computer to a router with an Ethernet cable. That's a very rudimentary setup, however. You'll need other components if you want to add multiple computers to your network, share files, stream multimedia, share a printer, or control which computers can access data on the network. And complexity increases if you decide that some links in your network will be made wirelessly. Fortunately, we're here to assist. We've gathered together a list of all gear you'll need to quickly and easily set up a home or small home-office network, and some key hints for getting it all to work together.
Choose a Wireless Router
You can't have a home or small office network without a router. And for almost every network you're likely to build these days, that means a combination of wired and wireless connections. A wireless router can provide both.
The router acts as a bridge between your home network (your local area network or LAN) and the Internet (the wide area network or WAN), and also allows all computers connected to it to share the connection. Your router also typically acts as your network's DHCP server, enabling each device that you connect to have an individual and private IP address. This is vital if you need the devices on the network to communicate with each other. Wireless routers also have embedded firewalls to protect a network from threats and intrusion. Use WPA or WPA2 security for protecting your Wi-Fi network, and never leave the router's administrator password at its default setting.
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