Small Business Network Setup
A depiction of a small business network
Small Business network setup can vary depending on how small a business you are talking about. For this post I will be talking about really small businesses, ones with five computers or less.
The first thing that has to happen is that a company has to be contacted that will bring Internet connectivity to your building. There are a bunch of these including the two biggies, Comcast and Century Link. They will provide a piece of equipment called a modem. A modem is a gadget that brings a telephone or cable signal into your building and has one ethernet connection coming out of it. Now, if all you have is one computer, you connect it to your modem and you are done. Your computer will have Internet connectivity. But that really isn’t a small business network setup. A network implies more than one computer. With a modem you only have one Internet connection. What we need here is a gadget that turns one Internet connection into many Internet connections, connects all of the computers to each other, oh and by the way, it would be nice if this gadget also created a wireless network.
That gadget is called a router. It connects to your modem and hands out Internet addresses to all the computers that are attached to it. Most routers will have four ports and if you need more there is another piece of equipment called a switch that can provide more Ethernet ports. In addition, as noted above, the router creates a wireless network that will allow computers near it to connect.
Having a router provides several benefits. You can share printers and folders across several computers and all computers get access to the Internet.
If you need help networking a small business, Plain & Simple Computing would be glad to help.
