As most of my work is with very small businesses or extremely large ones, like the council, the only network I am really familiar with is my one at home.

We have one router connected to the NBN box and three computers, three phones, an iPad, a smart TV, a Playstation and a printer connected to it. All these devices, or nodes, are connectedly wirelessly over wifi. There are several ethernet ports available but using them isn’t practical as we would need cable all over the house. They are connected in a star typology as the computers are not connected to each other. For security, the default user name and password was changed immediately.

One of the advantages is that all these devices are able to access the printer over the network. Plus, if we wanted to we could attach an external hard drive to the router to use as a shared drive or share files between the computers using AirDrop. We could also create parental controls or a VPN at the router level but realistically we do not need any these of features. Each household member is responsible for their own back up of data. It is useful to play videos from the phones on the TV, which connect automatically as they are on the same network.

This network is generally very effective. To improve it we could install a wifi extender so we would have better coverage in the backyard, but inside the house works well. Since we have moved over to the NBN recently we have experienced a drop in our internet speeds and more congestion. I am considering moving to a faster NBN plan to determine whether that would improve the situation.