pctechguide.com

  • Home
  • Guides
  • Tutorials
  • Articles
  • Reviews
  • Glossary
  • Contact

Home Networking

With the price of PCs falling at the same time the advantages for consumers to being connected – online investing and shopping, keeping in touch with long-distance friends and relatives, enjoying multiplayer games and tapping the vast resources of the Internet – continued to multiply, it was no surprise that by the late 1990s computer networking was being propelled from its traditional corporate base into a brave new world – the home.

However, with an increasing number of households owning two or more PCs – forecasts predicted that more than 30 million North American households would own two or more computers by the end of 2002 – they found themselves experiencing the same limitations that confronted businesses almost 20 years earlier: the inability to share computing and peripheral resources or to share information easily between computer users.

The four most compelling home network market drivers are:

  • Simultaneous high-speed Internet access using a single ISP account: As the Internet becomes an essential tool in business, education, medicine and government, as well as our personal lives, the demand for high-speed, convenient, easily accessible Internet access is mushrooming. Cable, ISDN, and digital subscriber line (DSL) modems provide the fastest Internet connections and allow family members to talk on the phone and use the Internet simultaneously.
  • Peripheral sharing: Families want to get the most out of their computer equipment investments by sharing the same printers, modems, or other peripherals from any PC in the home.
  • Sharing files and applications: Families also want to maximise the value of their software investments by sharing applications, and they want the convenience of sharing files easily, without having to transfer from machine to machine via floppies or CDs.
  • Entertainment: The new wave of multiplayer computer games, with their advanced graphics and exciting audio tracks, are beginning to grab consumer interest. Many analysts believe that PC games and entertainment software represent the swiftest long-term growth segment of the overall U.S. electronic gaming marketplace, with a combined unit annual growth rate of 24% being predicted between 1997 and 2002. The two biggest growth factors are the continuing price drop in home PCs and the opportunity for multiplayer gaming.

The solution for home users in the late 1990s is the same as it had been for corporate users more than a decade earlier: networking.

While consumer demand has swelled, recent advances have overcome the technological and complexity barriers that once prevented networking from migrating into nontechnical environments. Component prices have dropped, available network speeds have accelerated, and signal attenuation and noise problems have been addressed using low-cost, high-performance signal processing. However, success in the consumer market requires that home networks be inexpensive, easy to install and easy to use. Essentially, that means the technology must be transparent to the user.

By the early 2000s, home networking technologies had made significant progress towards meeting these requirements, providing consumers with an impressive array of options. The wired network technologies use some form of physical cabling to connect computing devices, the choice being between Ethernet, phoneline and powerline. Wireless networks, on the other hand, use electromagnetic airwaves – infrared or radio – to transmit information from one point to another.

Filed Under: Networking

Latest Articles

4 Benefits of Accounts Receivable Management Software

A growing number of companies rely on software to streamline their operations these days. One of the functions many companies use software for is accounting. According to Fortune Business Insights, the market for accounting software is going to be worth $19.7 billion by 2027. A crucial element … [Read More...]

Object Oriented Programming 3

Encapsulation From what we've covered so far we can suggest that: A class is an abstract data type made up of a combination of the relevant data and associated methods. Each class not only has specific data members, it also has it's member functions or methods. The methods are the tasks … [Read More...]

CD-ROM Operations

Apart from far more sophisticated error-checking techniques, the innards of a CD-ROM drive are pretty much the same as those used in CD audio players. Data is stored in the same way on all CDs. The information is stored in sequential 2KB … [Read More...]

Gaming Laptop Security Guide: Protecting Your High-End Hardware Investment in 2025

Since Jacob took over PC Tech Guide, we’ve looked at how tech intersects with personal well-being and digital safety. Gaming laptops are now … [Read More...]

20 Cool Creative Commons Photographs About the Future of AI

AI technology is starting to have a huge impact on our lives. The market value for AI is estimated to have been worth $279.22 billion in 2024 and it … [Read More...]

13 Impressive Stats on the Future of AI

AI technology is starting to become much more important in our everyday lives. Many businesses are using it as well. While he has created a lot of … [Read More...]

Graphic Designers on Reddit Share their Views of AI

There are clearly a lot of positive things about AI. However, it is not a good thing for everyone. One of the things that many people are worried … [Read More...]

Redditors Talk About the Impact of AI on Freelance Writers

AI technology has had a huge impact on our lives. A 2023 survey by Pew Research found that 56% of people use AI at least once a day or once a week. … [Read More...]

11 Most Popular Books on Perl Programming

Perl is not the most popular programming language. It has only one million users, compared to 12 million that use Python. However, it has a lot of … [Read More...]

Guides

  • Computer Communications
  • Mobile Computing
  • PC Components
  • PC Data Storage
  • PC Input-Output
  • PC Multimedia
  • Processors (CPUs)

Recent Posts

Is Etsy the Right Online Marketplace for Your Ecommerce Business?

Etsy is a great place to consider opening an online store. However, it is not without its drawbacks. You need to do your due diligence and know what … [Read More...]

Pentium 4 Removal

It's unlikely that you'll ever need to remove the fan/heatsink assembly once fit. However, if you do, Intel offer the following advice on how to … [Read More...]

Hot-Finder.com Virus Removal Guide

Hot Finder is another browser hijacker that can make your browsing experience annoying and cause issues for your PC. Installing this hijacker will … [Read More...]

[footer_backtotop]

Copyright © 2025 About | Privacy | Contact Information | Wrtie For Us | Disclaimer | Copyright License | Authors