Home and small office networking overview

With home and small office networking, even if you do not have the resources, time, or experience of a network administrator, you can build a small network in your home or small office. Home and small office networking is a group of features that limits hardware requirements and automates configurations for routing and private IP addressing. This reduces the work that is typically required to connect and configure a network. It also reduces the associated costs.

Home and small office networking provides many of the benefits of traditional networks and offers benefits that are uniquely suited for a home or small office network. With home and small office networking you can:

• Share one Internet connection with all of the computers on your network.
• Provide local private network services, such as name resolution and addressing, automatically.
• Share printers or other hardware devices, such as cameras and scanners, from any computer on your network.
• Share folders and files with other computers on your network.
• Use one computer to secure your entire network and protect your Internet connection.
• Easily establish network connections across two or more types of network media, such as IEEE 1394, Ethernet, wireless, and Home Phoneline Network adapters.

This section covers:

• Home and small office networking features
• Home and small office networking compared to Routing and Remote Access