A home network or home area network (HAN) is a residential local area network (LAN) for communication between digital devices typically deployed in the home, usually a small number of personal computers and accessories, such as printers and mobile computing devices. An important function is the sharing of Internet access, often a broadband service provisioned by fiber-to-the-home or via Cable Internet access, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) or mobile broadband by Internet service providers (ISPs). If an ISP only provides one IP address, a router including network address translation (NAT), proxy server software and typically a network firewall, allows several computers to share the external IP address. The router function may be assumed by a PC with several network interfaces, but a dedicated router device is more common, often including a wireless accesspoint, providing WiFi access.
Read more about Home Network: Home Group, Physical Transmission Media
Famous quotes containing the words home and/or network:
“... I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)