The Ins and Outs of Wireless Home Networking

Gone were the days when a single computer would suffice for the whole family’s use. And when you have more than one computer in your home, you can maximize your computing capabilities through home networking.

Home networking is the idea of connecting all your computers in the home into one big memory and drive. Each computer retains its physical attributes like its own drives and applications, but every computer in the network can make use of the storage space of all computers in the network depending on how you have set up your home networking system.

When you have a home networking system set up, you can back up all your important files in another computer or in all computers as desired. You can therefore be assured that important files are secured against any eventuality. Home networking also allows you to use one internet connection for all your computers. You therefore do not need to pay for internet connections for each of your computers.

Home networking has two general classifications, wired home networking and wireless home networking. Wired home networking is the traditional home networking method. It is accomplished through the use of Ethernet cables like CAT5. However, wired home networking has disadvantages, the main disadvantage being unwieldiness of complicated cable connections. Thus, people are now tending to favor wireless home networking over wired home networking.

Wireless Home Networking

Wireless home networking is the process of connecting several computers through radio signals or waves instead of the traditional cables. To set up a wireless networking system, you’d have to have computers that are capable of wireless communication. Most newer models of computers and laptops have such wireless transmitters and are thus very easy to connect to a wireless home networking system. If your computer does not have a wireless transmitter, do not despair as wireless adapters that can plug in to your computer can also be bought to make your computer viable for wireless home networking.
After making sure that your computers are fully wireless home networking capable, you need to acquire a wireless router. It is similar in concept with the wired home networking router, except this one does not need cables from each computer to be plugged into it. The wireless router facilitates the connection among the computers in a wireless home networking environment though radio signals instead of cables.

If you intend to connect your printers and scanners to the wireless home networking system as well, then you’d better buy printers and scanners that are capable of wireless communication. Or you could buy adapters for these hardware. You could also just connect them to a computer through the use of cables, and then proceed to access them though the computer they are connected to.

Advantages of Wireless Home Networking

The main advantage of a wireless home networking is flexibility. You are able to move your computers around without much difficulty because your computers are not networked through cables. You also don’t have to trip against cables that snake around your house. Of course, if you have a big house, the 100-feet standard range to wireless connectivity may adversely impact your connection. But you can solve this by buying range extenders.

One other advantage to wireless home networking is also becoming more and more affordable to compete with the traditional wired home networking setup. It can even be cheaper to maintain a wireless home networking than a wired home networking system.

One reminder though, you have to safeguard the security of your data. As data travels through radio signals, you will have to protect against radio signal “eavesdroppers.”