Home networking guide Mapping your network

It pays to do a bit of planning before buying any network equipment or attempting to set one up.

A good way to start is by drawing a basic diagram of your house, with all the devices you want to add to your network and which rooms they’re in. Then work out what networking kit you’re going to need and how to connect it all.

Planning

In our example, we have a main PC in the study, an older desktop PC in the spare room upstairs, and a laptop. We also have a printer we’d like to share, and a media-streaming device in the living room.

So, we’ll need a wireless router in our study, near the broadband modem and phone socket, for our internet connection. We have a modem with an Ethernet connection that we got from our broadband provider, so we can plug this into our wireless router to share the internet connection with all our computers. (If you don’t have a modem with ethernet, you can buy a gateway: a combined router and modem.)

Since our main desktop PC is nearby, we can plug this into the router using an ethernet cable. By connecting our printer to the main PC, we can then share it with the other computers on the network through that.

Our laptop doesn’t have Intel Centrino or AirPort built in, so we'll need a PCMCIA or USB adaptor to enable it to access the internet from anywhere in the home or garden, or from Wi-Fi hotspots found in many hotels, airports and cafes.

Our PC in the spare room is too far away to connect with a cable, so we'll add it to the network in the easiest way possible: with a USB Wi-Fi adaptor.

Sound and vision

To be able to listen to the music stored on our main PC through the hi-fi, or to browse the digital photos on our computer through the television, we could add a media-streaming device to the network, too.

To connect it wirelessly, we may need a different type of Wi-Fi adaptor, such as a wireless bridge. It might sound like a lot of work, but we'll guide you through the set-up process.