Wireless Home Networking - Index of

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Part II: Making Plans
Deciding What to Connect
to the Network
Believe it or not, some technogeeks have a computer in every room of their
house. We have some close friends who fit into that category (including, well,
ourselves). You may not own as many computers as we do (Danny has more
than 10 in his house and Ed is already past 15 — Pat comes in last with only
5, but for three people, how many do you really need?), but you probably
own more than one, and we’re guessing that you have at least one printer
and some other peripherals. You’re wirelessly networking your home for a
reason, no matter whether it’s to share that cool, new color inkjet printer (or
scanner or digital video recorder), to play your computer-based video files
on your new widescreen TV, or to give every computer in the house alwayson
access to the Internet. Whatever your reason, the first thing you must do
when planning a wireless home network is to determine what you want connected
to the network.
Counting network devices
The first step to take in planning a network is to count the number of devices
you want to attach to the network — that means any computer or device
that you want attached to your broadband Internet connection, to your file
servers, or to shared resources, such as printers. You almost certainly will
connect to your network each of the computers you use regularly.
Next, consider devices that aren’t necessarily computers in the traditional
sense but that can benefit from a network connection — for example, the
printers we mention in the preceding paragraph. You don’t need to connect
a printer directly to a single PC in a networked environment — you can connect
it to a device known as a print server and let all your networked PCs
access it. Similarly, you can connect devices such as NAS (Network Attached
Storage), which let you store big files in a centralized location (or even do PC
backups over the network). In Chapter 14, we talk about a whole big bunch of
networkable devices that can go on your wireless LAN.
If you’re an audiophile or just enjoy digital media, you should consider adding
your home entertainment system to your network so that you can share MP3
files, play video games, and watch DVDs from anywhere in your house, wirelessly!
(These cool gadgets are covered in Chapters 11 and 12.) You can even
make your phone calls over your wireless network with one of the Wi-Fi
phones we talk about in Chapter 13.