You are looking buoyant having built your simple home network. You are able to share your files with the PCs of your family members, OK.

There is a limitation to these operations. It’s like building a boat at home and parking in your backyard. Unless it floats in the ocean, how can you sail to other destinations? Likewise, you have to connect your home network to the high speed internet provided by cable TV operator.  

You can first choose to connect each device on your home network independently to the broadband internet service

This is most expensive option. You have to pay the cost of multiple DSL, cable or satellite modems. There are some advantages in that each computer gets the full security features offered by ISP without any complex designing on the part of the home network builder.

Each of your devices gets the full bandwidth and hence performance is excellent with built-in redundancy. Even if one connection goes off-line, you have another to access the internet.  

The second choice of yours can be to use one DSL or cable modem, insert a hub inline, and connect multiple devices in the hub. You can purchase independent IP addresses, for a high cost from the ISP.

Performance on each device is still optimal, depending upon the router which handles your average traffic without slowing down the speed.

Third choice can be of Internet Connection Sharing. This is cost effective, but slightly more complex in terms of work by the home network designer. One of your computers will be used as a router and Internet Connection Sharing software in windows or Linux will be installed in the rest of the devices by the home network designer.

The computer connected to the internet directly will be assigned a IP address by ISP, with an extra NIC installed. To the second adapter is connected a cable that runs to a NIC in the next computer.

By utilizing Internet Connection Software that is got in Windows or Linux, you can configure both devices to share the single internet connection. Though it is cost effective, it is less reliable. The directly connected computer performs at slower speed when the second computer uses any network.

This is because all network traffic to the second computer has to be dealt by the hardware and software in the first computer which is directly connected to the broadband. Internet connection goes offline for the second computer when the first computer that is directly connected to the broadband is rebooted or shut down.

So this method of connecting the internet to the home network is more disadvantageous. Fourth method for you is to use Router and Hub. With reduction in cost rates of components and reduction in complexity of designing, this method is more preferred by people. A router is connected to the DSL, cable or satellite modem.

This is a gateway for all network traffic to and from the internet by any single device in the home network.

Routers allow multiple connections but a hub should be used to provide enough ports for all the devices in the home network.

In this type of connection, each device gets full security provided by ISP and the router is the common firewall to the devices.

If no single user constantly downloads large files from the internet, routers can easily handle the traffic from all users. There is always safe file sharing between devices in the home network.

Configuration is simpler that you can use DHCP assigned IP addresses using the DHCP server function in the most routers. The above last method seems to work good for your connecting to the internet.