Home Networking: The Missing Manual

Wired Networks

While you may have heard lots about wireless networking, wired networks are often the easiest to set up, the cheapest to buy, and the most stable to maintain. Wired networks come in two main flavors:

• Ethernet uses cables that look like fat telephone wires. Ethernet is by far the most common type of network in use today because it's fast, cheap, and reliable. How fast? It runs anywhere from 10 to 1,000 megabits per second (see the box "A Bit about Bits" for detailed information about these data speeds, but for now, just imagine that at 10 Mbps, you could transfer the entire contents of a 40-gigabyte iPod in about 9 hours across your network; with a 1,000 Mbps connection, you'd be done in under 6 minutes). Practically every piece of home-networking equipment in existence includes Ethernet ports. Even wireless networking equipment includes Ethernet capabilities so that you can easily connect it to a wired network. This standardization is particularly important because it makes it a lot easier to mix and match networking technology.

  Note

  The speed of your Ethernet network depends on your hardware. 100 Mbps is the most common speed today, and 1,000 Mbps, (also called Gigabit Ethernet), is gaining popularity. 10 Mbps is going the way of the vinyl record.

  The only downside to Ethernet is that if you want to connect computers in more than one room, or if you want the freedom to use your laptop on the sofa or in bed, you have to run unsightly cables to every computer in every ...