Imagine this situation if you will: You own/rent a home/apartment. For one reason or another, all the walls are finished off with wallboard of some sort, all the wires you ever thought you’d need are inside of the walls and are poking out through jacks. Power Outlet’s, Cable TV outlets, and Phone outlets are all wired into the wall. Five or so years ago, those walls would not have posed a concern when it comes to computers because the only wires home machines used to communicate with other computers was the phone line.
Times have certainly changed; PCs can be built for around $500. Many homes have more than on PC, one for the kids, one for the parents, and possibly a few more if you’re a transistor head like myself. Without some sort of Ethernet or other networking, your only option to transfer files is the good old floppy disk. The only way to share an Internet connection is to use Home Phoneline Networking kits. Home Phonline kits run about US$100, but usually only offer 1Mbps of bandwidth, which is enough to share a broadband Internet connection, but that, is about it. You’ll still need to designate a machine that will do the actual sharing, called a server.
SMC has been big in the SOHO networking market for quite some time now. Like any company that knows what’s going on around them, they have jumped into the Broadband router market. A Broadband router is essentially a normal Networking Router, but has DHCP abilities, along with a limited amount of configuration that is available to the administrator. For example, the SMC7004WBR featured in this review is configured to only route packets between the Internet, and an Internal Class C network (Net Mask of 255.255.255.0).
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