Home wireless networking is just what it sounds like — a way of creating networks without any wires within your home! If this sounds exciting to you, then read on.
With a home wireless network, you can create radio connections between computers that let them communicate and connect to the Internet without you having to go to all the trouble of connecting them with wires. The computers don’t even need to have a clear path for the signal, as the wireless signal can go through walls and between floors easily.
Wireless Network at Home.
When most people talk about wireless networks, they are talking about wireless LANs (local area networks). A local area network doesn’t mean that it covers your whole neighbourhood — the ‘local area’ in question can be only one building, such as your house. So if you want wireless networking in your home, you want a home wireless LAN.
Once people have wireless in their home, they always seem to act as if there’s been an absolute miracle. After years of drilling holes in the walls and running wires all over the place, suddenly seeing them gone is really amazing.
Home Wireless Network Myths.
Home wireless networking is expensive. Well, home wireless networking used to be expensive when it was new, but now the prices have come way down thanks to competition and mass production. There are hundreds of manufacturers of wireless equipment, with something for every budget. Your costs will depend on how many computers you want to connect and how far apart they are, but a typical family should still be able to do it for less than $100 overall. If you’re willing to leave one of the computers on whenever you’re using the other one, you could do it for as little as $20! Best of all, once you’ve spend the money, there’s nothing more to pay after that.
Wireless networking your home is hard. Again, this myth is a holdover from the early days of wireless. It used to be very difficult, with you needing to fiddle endlessly with the configuration on each computer just to get the simplest things to work. Now, though, windows supports wireless out of the box, and setting it up is easier than ever. You can usually plug in what you’ve bought, put the CD in the computer and then sit back and watch it all work perfectly!
A home wireless network is in secure. You might think it’s dangerous to have all your personal data floating around in the air for anyone to read. Well, if you want, it’s dead easy to enable encryption for your wireless signals. It’s already difficult for outsiders to intercept wireless signals at all, and they certainly won’t be able to decode them as well.
Not Just at Home.
It was home users that were quickest to adopt wireless technology, willing to pay any amount to finally be free of needing to run wires all over their house. Since then, though, the technology has started to spread to offices, universities, and all sorts of other places.
Chains of coffee shops and cafes have found that their customers will stay for hours if they offer wireless Internet access, and it’s also becoming more common in hotels andairports. This means that once you set up a laptop for wireless, it becomes far more portable than it ever was before.
