Home Network Basics
Setting up your own home network can seem a bit daunting at first.
Relax – it’s far simpler than you think.
It’s really a very basic concept: you want to quickly find, perform and share things that reside on your computer with your family – such as files, photos, music, games, videos chats, and more. You also want everyone to be able to use the same printer without having to carry thumb drives around, or laboriously reassign printer anytime you want to use a different computer or device. A home network also enables you to connect other devices to each other and to the Internet such as an Xbox for live gaming or a internet camera for web chatting or even a wireless home audio device such as a Linksys by Cisco Director that allows you to play all your music and access Internet music services such as Rhapsody.
Simply put, a home network can help you hook up and share all of your ‘stuff’ without even thinking about it. Cisco Network Magic, makes setting up your home network quite simple, even for those who wouldn’t consider themselves technically savvy. But some of you are wondering, why do I need a home network and how does a home network work?
First, let’s start with the most basic configuration: a couple of computers sharing a printer and a connection to the Internet. That connection to the Internet happens in a device called a router or even a wireless router, which also acts as the hub of the home network itself. Everything inside your home is connected to this hub, either physically – ‘wired’ – via coaxial cable, or remotely, via wireless adapters that reside on or connect to every peripheral like a printer or a game console.
Wireless networking permits all those devices to go untethered so you get gaming connection in the basement, laptops on the couch, digital photographs shared effortlessly, movies and music…on all your network – all without running cables back to the wireless router.
How does that work? Wireless routers transmit radio waves to connect all your devices. The radio signal (in the 2.4 or 5.0 GHZ frequency ) is sent to and from every wireless device in your network – provides a type of encoding since it turns bits and bytes into radio waves, and the wireless router acts as the decoder. The router is still connected to the outside world via a cable (the coaxial cable (blue or gray) that comes in from your service provider). You know the same connection you plug your TV into to get cable TV?
But if everyone in your home can share everything, can’t people outside your home do the same thing? You’ve read about drive-by signal grabbers, or lazy neighbors stealing connections? That’s where the router comes in. It acts as a secure firewall, if it’s set up properly, preventing any but authorized devices and users to access the hub.
So how can the router protect all of the information you send out – your credit card and social security numbers, for example? And how can it protect you from lazy neighbors sneaking onto your connection and slowing things down? The answer is wireless encryption, using standard forms of encryption like Wired Equivalency Privacy (WEP) and Wireless Protected Access (WPA), as well as Media Access Control (MAC). They allow only your devices to access your router wirelessly, and add a layer of security that guard against unauthorized access to your computers (from predatory Web scams, for example) from outside.
This is where Cisco Network Magic comes in…Cisco Network Magic is a software application that makes connecting new devices to the router and adding new users to the home network so simple that non-technical users can do it easily by following simple (and simply presented) set up steps. In addition, Network Magic gives you the tools to easily set up wireless security, share files and printers and the ability to prevent your kids from accessing the Internet at certain times as well as selecting which sites they can not log on to. Finally, Network Magic monitors your network to identify its security gaps (and alerts you to those weaknesses), and diagnoses and repairs poorly performing or broken connections.
To put it simply, Cisco Network Magic makes home networks work more effectively, because it takes away all the complexity. It just works. And you don’t have to know how or why.
What’s the future of home networking? Home Networking is all about connecting devices to communicate to each other – the next phase is all about experiencing all the content available in the home and out over the internet and accessing it on any device that is connected to internet. It will be about accessing and sharing media such as video and communications that we have only dreamed of being able to do. However, what is important is to make it all happen, you need a home network to connect up all your stuff.. and it isn’t that hard to do.
Click here to visit the Cisco Network Magic site. If you have any questions on this subject please let us know in the comment section on this blog. You can also reach out to us on Twitter (@DigitalCribs), or Facebook.
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Posted by Johanna Fry at 02:21PM PST
Johanna Fry
Joannah Mar 18, 2009
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed
reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Joannah
http://2gbmemory.net