If you want to build a personal network, planning ahead can save both money and time especially if you ever know you will grow your local area network in the distant future.
The whole point of coming up with a plan is to realize what you actually need to put in your network, after all there are many more things available than just having computers that connect to the internet.
This includes WiFi, cables, or even both
Although you might be only using wired connections, will you be able to use WiFi in the future?
Almost everyone at some point, and the difference in prices between a wired router and wireless router is small, and just about every wireless router still have a wired ethernet hub built into them meaning we can still connect both wired and wireless devices.
The whole point most people want a home network setup is to share an internet connection, in this case it’s imperative the security and the router has the latest firmware, this includes Wireless Security, Router Security & each computer must have a firewall, anti-spyware and a firewall.
Long gone are the days of having to share your hard drive or have a special computer, network attached hard drives are easy to setup and they typically have space from 500gb to 2tb. Some even have a wireless option.
The speed of a network can be a major factor if you send big files, truth be told a cabled network will always be faster than wireless, as a rule of thumb use cabled where possible and wifi where you have to, i.e laptops.
One of the big mistakes made when many of us are setting up a home network in the house is thinking about future expansions to the network, spending a little less today will only mean you spend more down the road, work within your budget but be realistic, setup the network that suits your needs and and budget.
By: Alex D Smith
Posts Tagged ‘Ethernet Hub’
How to Setup a Home Network – Choosing Your Network Equipment
February 4th, 2010CompTIA A+, Network+ Certification Tutorial – Function of Network Hubs
December 14th, 2009
A hub is a device used to connect all of the computers on a star or ring network. A hub is nothing more than a box with a series of cable connectors in it. Hubs are available four- and five-port devices designed for home and small business networks to large rack-mounted units with up to 24 ports or more. Installing a single hub is simply a matter of connecting it to a power source and plugging in cables connected to the network interface adapters in your computers.
Hubs are associated with specific data-link layer protocols. Ethernet hubs are common, because Ethernet is a popular data-link layer protocol. Token Ring MAUs are hubs too, and other protocols, such as the Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) also use hubs.
An Ethernet hub is called a multiport repeater. A repeater is a device that amplifies a signal as it passes through it. If you have a thin Ethernet network with a cable segment longer than the prescribed maximum, you can install a repeater at some point in the segment to strengthen the signals and increase the maximum segment length. This repeater only has two BNC connectors. The hubs used on UTP Ethernet networks are repeaters as well, but they can have many RJ45 ports instead of just two BNC connectors.
When data enters the hub, the hub amplifies the signal and transmits it out through all of the other ports. This enables a star network to have a shared medium. The hub relays every packet transmitted by any computer on the network to all of the other computers, and also amplifies the signals. The maximum segment length for a UTP cable on an Ethernet network is 100 meters. A segment is defined as the distance between two communicating computers. Hubs function as a repeater, each of the cables connecting a computer to a hub port can be up to 100 meters long, allowing a segment length of up to 200 meters when one hub is inserted in the network.
By: M. Aslam
