Networking Your Home: How and Why

A series of articles on building and managing a home network

Stephen Phillips — Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash

I’m a software engineer by trade and a tinkerer at home. I’m not an IT professional, but I’ve spent much of my professional and hobby life “IT adjacent”. In this series of articles, I’m going to walk through the how’s and why’s of building a (wired and wireless) network in my home. Along the way, I’ll share what I’ve learned about the process, my successes, and my failures. Hopefully, this will serve as a good introduction to home networking and a guide to the costs and benefits.

Why Network Your House?

In the era of remote work, the first answer to this question is obvious: productivity. A home network is the first and last leg of communication with our colleagues and workplaces. We need a network connection we can count on, functional speed, and easy ways to boost our productivity … either for our own satisfaction or to help make the point to our boss that we should continue to work from home in the future.

Personally, there is nothing more frustrating to me than when my computer or network aren’t working properly. I’m a very mellow person, but routinely dropped file uploads or computer freezes are enough to have me cursing out loud.

Image Credit: Business photo created by wirestock — www.freepik.com

As a software engineer, a reliable network has become far more important for me. In ages past, you would write your code on a local machine and compile it on that machine. Maybe you’d even test it on that machine. You needed a powerhouse of a computer, but not much else.

Today’s work entails downloading libraries, developing APIs, remote building and deployment to servers, and even remote test servers. I have colleagues who work full time from Google Chromebooks, which are barely more than a network connection wrapped in a tablet.

A high-speed, reliable home network gives the flexibility to work from anywhere in and around your home (my back deck in the summer is a sublime place to zone out to some code writing). It might even be faster and more stable than your office connection that you’re sharing…