Home Networking 101

Jim Carroll's home network spans 3 floors and 13 computers. Six years ago, he ran Category 5 cable throughout the walls of his suburban Toronto home. Using this cabling and a hodgepodge of hubs, routers, and Ethernet adapters, he has linked four Linux servers in his basement with the eight desktop PCs and two printers distributed throughout his house. "There are eight network connections in my kitchen alone," says Carroll, a 43-year-old accountant.

You'd think that would be enough for Carroll, but then along came wireless technology. He added an 802.11b wireless access point above a cabinet in one of his upstairs bedrooms. Using a wireless adapter in his laptop to communicate with the access point, he can now tie into the rest of his network while lounging on a lawn chair in the backyard.

His network provides a lot of flexibility in the way his family works and plays with the computers and other electronics. Jim Carroll, his wife, and their two sons can access two printers from any PC in the house and can share files among machines. Since the network also includes two broadband connections to the Internet, they can all surf the Web or send e-mail, too.

Carroll's network is obviously far more sophisticated than that of the average household. But the growing number and types of home networks make Carroll's setup seem not so extreme. Roughly 9.5 million American households are equipped with PC-based data networks, whether wired, wireless, or both, according to market research firm In-Stat/MDR. And this figure is projected to grow to 13.2 million by the year's end. Among PC Magazine readers, almost 40 percent have home networks, of which 60 percent are wired and 40 percent are wireless, according to a survey conducted in November.

For most households, networking tasks remain relatively simple, with Internet connection sharing, file sharing, and printer sharing leading the pack. But as Carroll and others can tell you, that's only the beginning.

Networks for Audiophiles and Video Fans

Recently, Carroll expanded his network yet again by installing a Voyetra Turtle Beach AudioTron-100, a digital media player (www.tbeach.com). With the AudioTron-100 ($299.95 direct), which connects to his network and home stereo, he can grab any of the 13,000 MP3s stored on his basement servers, shuttle them to his living room, and play them back through the stereo's speakers instead of through a PC. Moreover, the device can tap into his broadband connections and play Internet radio. And though he normally uses the buttons on the media player's front panel or a remote control to tell the device what songs or stations to play, he can also control it with a Web browser on any of the PCs on his home network. "I just change the tune on my stereo by way of my wireless connection," he explains.

The AudioTron-100 is just one of several network-ready digital-media players now on the market. And some of these players don't stop with music. Manufacturers are also selling products that let you move digital photos and videos—in addition to music files—between PCs and home entertainment devices. (For more on the various types of media hubs available, check out our .)

Gaming Home Invasion

Like audiophiles and videophiles, gamers are another group that's finding plenty of reasons to set up home networks. For years, people have been playing PC-based games across their networks. Ron Oden, a 32-year-old IT consultant for the U.S. Navy living in Norfolk, Virginia, often throws what's commonly known as a LAN party. He and several friends will congregate in his upstairs home office, plug their laptops into his network, and play first-person shooter games like Counter-strike and Half-Life, competing with each other across the network.

"If it's just a couple of people, we hook directly into my router, but if it's more, we add a hub to the router and hook into that," says Oden. "One night, when my fiancée was away, I had 12 people over."

But PC gaming now has serious competition on home networks in the form of gaming consoles like the Microsoft Xbox and the Sony PlayStation 2. Adding a single console to your network, you can play games with users across the Internet. Adding more than one, you can play with multiple people and compete inside your home, as you would with a conventional PC LAN party.

Market research firm IDC estimates that roughly 700,000 Americans have connected home entertainment devices to their PC networks, and in most cases, these devices are Xboxes and PlayStation 2's. Tying a gaming console to your network is cheap and simple. The Xbox includes an Ethernet adapter, and for $30 to $50 you can purchase an external Ethernet adapter for the PlayStation. In addition, networking companies like D-Link and Linksys now offer what is generally known as a wireless Ethernet bridge, letting you connect these devices to wireless networks.

The Future

Going forward, you can expect to get even more from a home network. For instance, some companies are already selling products that let you network traditional appliances like toasters and washing machines or turn your lights, heating, and air conditioning on and off via a Web browser over the Internet.

"You'll see mass-market smart home networks five years down the road," says In-Stat analyst Jaclynn Bumback. X10—famous among Internet users for the pop-up ads that advertise its wireless cameras (www.X10.com)—and Leviton (www.leviton.com) both offer inexpensive kits that let you access light fixtures and ordinary appliances from your PC. Echelon (www.echelon.com) provides much more complex smart networking hardware, which gives you even greater control over appliances.

Further out, perhaps two decades from now, many of us will enjoy the advantages of fiber-optic connections directly into our homes. Currently, according to In-Stat/MDR, roughly 50,000 subscribers—mostly in exclusive new home developments—enjoy this form of connectivity. Companies such as Alcatel and Optical Solutions are already selling backbone equipment to developers and service providers. And depending on how providers configure the systems in a given development, home owners can take advantage of a raw throughput of 20 to 600 Mbps.

Just imagine the multimedia and other applications for home networks that could be created to fill those pipes. Ultimately, this means that all your audio, video, voice, and ancillary data could flow across a single network in your home.

But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.

Back to Basics

Whether your plan is to use a home network to play games across multiple PCs, to enjoy your MP3s from any room, or simply to share a printer or an Internet connection (like most people), you first need to understand the basics. In the following pages, we tell you everything you need to know on the subject. We explore three networking technologies in depth—wired Ethernet, wireless, and power-line—and test performance to see how they compare. For novices, we explain how to set up a home network with each technology. And if you already have a network, we tell you how to enhance it.