With over 35 years experience in electronics and computer systems.
Network installation has many phases
Installation of the network communications media, in the majority of business this will be copper wire known as cat 5 or spelled out category 5. This is a classification of cable that permits a very high speed or rate of data transfer across the cable from one computer system to another. There are many types of cable that may be used for communications between computers, you may even use the existing phone wiring in your home. However the use of the existing phone wiring will be slow compared to business office cat 5 speeds.
Another aspect of networking is how much speed do you need?
Using existing phone wiring speeds up to 1 mb / second may be
achieved.
Using coax cable (one conductor inside a shield) you may
achieve up to 10 mb / second.
Using cat 3 twisted pair cable you may reach speeds up to 10
mb / second.
Using cat 5 twisted pair cable speeds up to 200 mb / second.
Using the newest standard cat 5e speeds up to 350 mb / second
are achieved.
You may also have heard of wireless this is a great option each wireless node supports several connections, but the wireless node must be hardwired to the server, internet, other computers via a switch, hub, router. At the time of this site creation wireless data rates are 11 mb/sec. This is a midrange speed and compared to the average speed of individual internet connections it is very fast. If you do not like to run wires thru walls, floors, ceilings or pay someone to do this, wireless may be for you. Like any new idea wireless is still fairly pricey, a connection point is in the $150 and up. The individual computer wireless ports are in the $100 and up range, wire is cheap and faster.
These are all great information but what does it mean? Lets just say if your house was on fire, would you want a garden hose to put it out with or a fire hose? Just because you have the ability to deliver 100 gallons of water a minute a valve is a wonderful thing and can regulate the flow to your needs. Your computer network is very similar just because you have two employees now, if your business grows you will need the faster speeds. The cost difference between phone line, coax, cat 3, cat 5, cat 5e are low as compared to running more cable in another year.
Our recommendations are to run the highest grade of cable available at the time. You can run phone signals on cat 5e but you can not run 350 mb/sec of data on standard phone cable.
Now that the cabling has been decided, what about support hardware?
Routers, firewalls, hubs, switches there are many providers of this type of hardware, and in today's market there are NO GUARANTEES a vendor will be there the next day. Sticking with a brand name is always good. I have preferences I use in my own systems, but I do not endorse them in my web site, nor will I ever cut another vendors product. Just remember with today's technology there are many inexpensive products that will do as well for many small business applications as the more expensive older brand names.
If you are considering fulltime connection to the internet ie: DSL, Cable modem, T1, or other you should also include a router with a hardware firewall. This is accomplished using a technique known as IP Translation. In essence it changes the unique address of your companies computers to appear as one computer, and the router remembers which computer asked for what an makes sure that it receives the information it requested.
Each computer on the network must have a network card installed in it in order to communicate with others. The network cards must be compatible with both the cable and the computer, we will help to determine the appropriate card to fit your needs.