Interested in Building a Home Network.

What is the Purpose?

You can have One Computer in every Room of your House.

The common connection may go to the color printer in the hall. By creating a home network, you can share high-speed internet access with any computer in your apartment.

Using webcams, you can monitor what your kids are doing in the next room while you are still at work.

You can share data and multimedia files within your household computers.

You can print in color from the room in the first floor. You can watch a movie from a media PC in the next room on PC connected TV in the master bedroom. 

Talking about the technical details, the network resembles a spider web.

It has a series of lines (called routers) which have intermediate and end points (nodes) that connect the computers in the home together.

These connections allow the PCs in your house to share, input or output information across the network.

The signals containing interesting information for the user, pass through these routers and nodes. Like the spider which from one end of the web receives signals of fly getting tugged at the other end,

the computer connected in the home network sends or receives signals in the form of packets. 

Software and hardware on the network do the job of passing those packets.

The packets are quantum of information containing your data protected in control information.

Those control commands prefixing and suffixing your data allows routers to identify the PC where the message is to be sent. Internet Protocol or IP is the method used by the network to accomplish this task. 

Each PC in your rooms in the house being connected in home network, gets an address assigned to it in the form of dotted octet.

In home networking, these addresses are like 10.0.0.0 through 10.255.255.255 or 172.16.0.0.
through 172.16.0.0 through 172.31.255.255 or 192.168.0.0 through 192.168.255.255.  

These are private addresses, which cannot be used unmodified over networks outside your home. They are specifically meant for your home networking.

To form a home network, you don't need a high speed internet. To receive information from commercial networks, you have to be connected through an internet service provider for economical rates. 

Commercial networks used by small and large companies also use these address ranges. A mechanism called a router uses (network address translation) NAT,  allows many houses and commercial centers to use the same address range

For a single computer terminal using the commercial internet network, the IP address is unique like 70.31.192.243.

The internet service provider assigns this address to a single internet user.

The router an printer connected to this single terminal have distinct IP address which helps communication being possible without confusion.

The software/hardware combination in router cooperates well with the software/hardware combination in networking in routing the data to and from the correct devices using those distinct addresses.

This process is similar in operation as that of postal system.