Home Networking Simplified: An Illustrated Home Networking Handbook for the Everyday User

Chapter 7. High-Speed Internet Access

If you don’t have high-speed (broadband) Internet, you have a problem. Actually, you have two problems:

• If you are on dialup, it’s not so easy to share an Internet connection, and then even if you do find a way to share a connection, you will either tie up your phone line for hours at a time or have to get a second phone line, which adds to your monthly expenses.

• The world is leaving you behind. Even before the wide availability of residential high-speed Internet access, many people thought dialup seemed pretty slow. Web pages took way too long to load, e-mails that included photos took forever to download, and forget trying to download your favorite song (legally, of course) or software updates.

Today, high-speed ...