Home Network Basics

- Why Network?

- Possibly more than one computer in your house.

- A Television you want to use to play your audio and video collection.

- If you have a DVR. [i.e. Tivo]

- Broadband Router - allows you to share your broadband connection throughout your house.

- WAN [Wide Area Network] - this is where you plug in your ethernet cable that comes from your broadband modem.

- LAN [Local Area Network] - this is where you plug in any network capable device.

- 802.11 Standard - was set by IEEE [or Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers]. It just refers to wireless networking in general.

- Choose your 802.11 flavor:

-802.11b:
- First wireless networking available.
- Offers 11 Mbps transfer.
- 30 meter coverage range.
- Uses the 2.4 GHz radio band.

- 802.11a:
- Offers 54 Mbps transfer.
- 30 meter coverage range.
- Uses the 5 GHz radio band.
- While rated at a range of 30 meters, the actual range dropped sharply if there were walls in the way.

- 802.11g:
- The successer of 802.11b.
- Backwards compatible with 802.11b.
- Offers 54 Mbps transfer.
- 30 meter coverage range.
- Uses the 2.4 GHz radio band.

- 802.11 n (draft version):
- Offers 540 Mbps transfer.
- It's 540 Mbps max, but only 200 Mbps during typical use, but some current 802.11n products list 300 Mbps.
- 50 meter coverage range.
- Uses the 2.4 + 5 GHz radio bands.
- The discussion on 802.11n has been going on since January 2004.
- 802.11g is like the universal wireless standard.

- One more thing: you can add wireless to a desktop PC using a PCI car, too.

- NAS - Network Attached Storage Device: in simple terms a hard drive that can be accessed by any device on your network.

- Shown on this episode: Maxtor 300GB H01R300 Storage NAS