The key to the connectivity is a home router. These can be bought for around £50-60, and usually provide 4 Ethernet ports and often a wireless connection as well. There are two types of router, and which one you get will depend on how your Internet connection is provided. There are several different wireless standards, with 802.11g which supports up to 54mbps being the most common. Older routers may only support 802.11b which has a maximum speed of 11 mbps.

If your broadband connection is via your phone line, i.e. ADSL, you will need an either ADSL modem with an Ethernet connection to connect to your router, or a router with an ADSL modem built in. This will have a telephone type RJ11 socket for the connection to the phone line. If you have NTL cable with broadband via the Set top box or cable modem with an Ethernet port, you will need a cable modem/router. Both types of modem normally provide DHCP functionality to allocate IP addresses and also include a hardware firewall.

Firstly a little about IP addressing. In order to communicate, each separate device must have it’s own “unique” IP address, and they must follow some rules. Your internet connection will be allocated an IP address by your ISP, and your home router will usually take care of addresses within your network. Although all addresses must be unique, the router will shield your LAN from the rest of the world, and there are some special ranges of addresses defined for use in private networks. The normal range used is one of the 192.168.0.* - 192.168.255.*. Most home routers use 192.168.0.* or 192.168.1.*. In either case the subnet mask will be 255.255.255.0 which means that you can have up to 254 devices connected together. More than enough for most of us!

The first stage is to get your Internet connection working with the router and just one PC. Connect the PC to a LAN port on the router using an Ethernet cable, one is usually supplied with each router. Switch on both the PC and router, and check whether you have connectivity to the router, by checking if you have been assigned an IP address. ( On W2K/XP, run “ipconfig” from a command prompt, on 95/98/Me, run “Winipcfg” from the Run command). You should get a display something like this:-

The IP address you get may be different, but the Subnet Mask should be 255.255.255.0, and the Default gateway will be the address of your router, typically 192.168.0.1, 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.2.1, depending on the make of your router
Now connect your router to the phone/cable line and configure the router for your Internet connection. Using a browser, connect to http://192.168.0.1 or whatever address was shown for your default gateway. This should bring up a signon menu, check the router documentation for the default password, it is usually either “admin”, “password” or “1234”.

Follow the prompt or manual to set up your Internet connection information, i.e. the username and password that your ISP gave you. Once this is setup, and you have saved the configuration, try connecting to the Internet.

Assuming this is working correctly, now connect the other PC’s using Ethernet cables to the router. You will need a Network card for each machine, wired or wireless, although most laptops now have wireless networking built in and will not need another card. PCI Ethernet cards can be bought for less than £10, whilst wifi cards are about £25.

To connect a laptop, you will need to configure wireless networking in the router. Initially, I suggest that you get it working without any security, but once the laptop is connected, you can enable security on both the router and the laptop. Given the choice, opt for WPA-PSK encryption. This requires a 63 or 64 bit key and is more secure than the older WEP encryption. Some Windows 95/98/Me machines may only support WEP unless you install a third party encryption package. If you want a truly random WPA key, you can generate one at https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm. Keep a record of this as you cannot find out the value later!.

At the end, you should have a network looking something like this:-