Home Networking The Complete Manual

Your home network is constantly under pressure to serve volumes of data to your computers, smart TVs, games consoles and more. While most of the time they work without too much hassle and interference, there are times when the router will drop its connection to the Internet, or your Wi-Fi stops working altogether. These are the times when knowing a little bit more about how it all works will help save you a lot of headaches - mostly from other members of the family! This book will help you get to grips with the technology involved in creating your network. What equipment is needed, and what it does, and how you can get the best from every piece of the networking puzzle. Inside you’ll discover how best to setup a…

The home network can be as simple as a single router and computer, browsing the Internet and watching the occasional episode on Netflix and the like. However, most of us have far more complex setups, and we don’t even realise it. Along with a smart TV, there’s usually a number of tablets, phones, laptops, computers, games consoles, AI devices such as Google Home and so on. Plus any number of security cameras, baby monitors, remote doorbells; the list of connected devices goes on. We’ve increased the number of devices on our networks, but what do all these pieces of networking equipment do, and how to do they work? You’ll find out in this chapter.…

Consider the average user: they contact an Internet Service Provider (ISP), sign up for a broadband deal, and in a day or two they receive their router through the post. This they hook up to their existing telephone line, power up, then wait as the lights on the router turn a certain colour indicating that a connection is made. They can then turn on their computer or device, locate the Service Set Identifier (SSID, the router’s name), enter the wireless password and connect to the Internet. After that, they tend to forget all about the router and what’s going on. Unless there’s a problem, then usually a quick reboot of the router will solve the issue. There is a lot more going on in the background though, and if you…

A router is simply a piece of hardware that’s designed to interconnect one network to another. They can be used to connect two individual office networks together, so the teams in each can share resources, but more specifically, in terms of the home user, they’re used to connect all your devices to each other and ultimately the Internet. Routers come in various shapes and sizes, offering many features; with some of the higher-end models offering more. Typically, a router, the one you’ll receive from your ISP when you sign up to a broadband deal, will be able to do the following: Connect to the Internet Your router will function as a bridge between your computer and the Internet via the ISP’s network. What this means is, your ISP has sent…

Switches come in many sizes. Some are quite small, offering just a few ports to connect to, while others, used mainly by companies, can have tens of ports. In the simplest terms, a switch enables multiple computers to connect to a network using a physical cable, called an Ethernet cable (or RJ45 cable). Each computer is connected to the switch, and multiple switches can be connected to each other. This allows hundreds of computers, let’s say on the floor of an office building, to be connected to the floors above and below, as well as to the company’s servers and routers. Switches also come with different backbone speeds, which is the physical limit the data can travel to and from each of the ports. These speeds range from 10Mb/s, to…

We take Wi-Fi and wireless connectivity for granted these days. The phone that most of us carry around, with its ability to connect to a network, or Bluetooth pair to another device, is simply an amazing piece of technology. As we said in the intro, it wasn’t all that long ago when connecting to a network over a wireless setup was simply out of the question. While it has existed since the early seventies, as UHF wireless packet networking, it wasn’t worth the exorbitant cost of installation, setup and maintenance. But Wi-Fi, which stands for Wireless Fidelity, has come a long way in a short time. In essence, as you already suspect, Wi-Fi is wireless connectivity; the ability to connect to a network and therefore the Internet wirelessly. It’s a…