How to Wire a Home Network
While wireless networks are becoming more and more common, there are still a number of reasons for choosing to go wired. Wired ethernet is simply faster and more reliable than wireless, and that can make a huge difference.
What's the Difference Between a Hub and a Switch?
From the outside, a hub and a switch look very similar. Both offer a row of ethernet ports and can perform many of the same functions in a networking environment. However, they perform very differently when it comes to actually managing the data interface. While hubs were once very common, they have largely been overshadowed by network switches:
- The OSI Model: Hubs work on the lowest level of networking, the physical layer. They simply provide more physical connections for the source and that's all. Powered hubs may boost the signal, but they don't do anything else with it. Switches work on a higher level and actually manage the signals, processing and directing it.
- The Effective Difference: In simplest terms, a hub offers shared bandwidth while a switch offers each device its own dedicated connection. This means that where a Gigabit Ethernet hub would share that gigabit between every device on the network, an Ethernet switch would offer the full bandwidth to each device individually. It's a huge performance upgrade. They also support full-duplex signaling which effectively doubles the bandwidth by transmitting in both directions.
What About Wiring a Network?
In the days of Fast Ethernet, wiring a network was simple, but the switch to Gigabit Ethernet has brought with it a number of additional factors to consider when choosing network hardware from a router to an Ethernet switch:
- Power: Some switches offer PoE ports which deliver power over Ethernet so that devices such as surveillance cameras can draw power from the same cable they use for data.
- Configuration: With the advent of plug and play technologies, Ethernet configuration has become much easier than before. The operating system handles things like installing drivers and managing buffer memory. You just connect to the router and start communicating. You can set everything from how it handles multicast traffic, to store and forward settings, and even activate auto-sensing connections.
Home and Business Networks
Business and home networks have different but similar requirements. A home network can use a three-port Ethernet switch as most devices rely on wireless, but a business environment may require rack-mountable units with multiple switch ports dedicated to connecting individual Ethernet network segments rather than a single network to a single router. Many manufacturers such as NETGEAR, TP-Link, and D-Link make routers, switches, and other network hardware, suitable for a wide range of home and business uses.