How My Home Network Has Changed Over The Years

June 09, 2015

How My Home Network Has Changed Over The Years

My blog post last week about my Sonos components made me think about my network. Many years ago I had a pretty traditional network setup: one desktop PC connected to a modem via an Ethernet cable. Over the years, a few things changed:

When our children got older, they got their own computers. Their bedrooms were not prewired for internet. My longtime friend, Eric Wagner, gave me my first wireless router as a birthday gift.
When we returned to California in 2009, we decided to be a cell phone only household — no land line. The problem was that we were AT&T customers that lived near the water, so our cell phone service was horrible. AT&T gave me a free mini-cell tower in exchange for agreeing to extend my service for one year. So when we are at home, our cell phones connect to the mini-cell instead of a satellite, and our conversations are delivered via the internet.
When we got an alarm system that same year since we had no land line, we connected our system to the security service via the internet. ADT gave me a connection module that we use in place of a phone line.
Also as part of moving into our house, we got two new HDTVs. Best Buy threw in two free Blu-ray players as part of the deal. These players connected to Blockbuster, Netflix, Pandora, and YouTube. I loved how Samsung realized that they were not in the DVD player business. They were in the entertainment delivery business. Back in 2009, the current technology for delivering movies was Blu-ray disks, but Samsung's player was forward-looking enough that it let me stream movies to the player instead.
In 2009 I became a Dish Network subscriber. At the time, I thought they had the best picture quality. Connecting the Hopper to the internet allows us to purchase pay-per-view events, but we have never done so.
We have iPads. When the first iPad came out, I thought it would be a flop. It wasn't a phone. What could you possibly use it for? I happened to visit the home of our CEO, Carl Bass, and he had one in his family room. He told me it never leaves the room. They just use it when watching TV. We were watching a football game and had a question about one of the referee's calls. Carl's son used the iPad to look up the official NFL rules. I saw how useful that was, and my wife and I each got one for Christmas. We answer emails and browse the web as we relax in our family room and watch sports.
We have since gotten newer iPads and use one of our original iPads as a music player. It has iTunes and Spotify on it and nothing else.
For Father's Day last year my children got me an XBox. I like to play Madden football.
I had always had a printer connected to my home PC. Then we wanted to print Southwest Airlines boarding passes from our iPads, so I got a wireless printer. This makes it easy for guests at our house to do the same without having to sit down at my personal computer which was little awkward for them anyway.
Like I mentioned last week, our most recent addition is the Sonos system. The BOOST unit could not be wireless, so I used a TP-Link setup to pass internet packets through my electrical wiring.
Unfortunately, our neighborhood has had some recent robberies. The modus operandi is that the criminals break a car window, take the garage opener, open the garage, and steal possessions from the garage. We are thankful they do not enter the homes. If they open our garage or enter our unit, I have strategically placed three Dropcams. I use the cloud service from Dropcam, so I can go back a week in time and review footage in the event of a burglary. One of the Dropcams is located in the garage where the wireless signal would not reach. I solved that with a Netgear wireless extender.

As I said last week, the Sonos setup requires a BOOST that is connected to the router; however, I think that is just for coordinating the stream. I am not sure, but I think the communication among the Sonos components might use Bluetooth instead of wireless. Does anyone know for sure?

How has your home network changed over the years? Let us know at [email protected].

Networking is alive in the lab.

Posted by Scott Sheppard at 04:00 AM | Permalink

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When our children got older, they got their own computers. Their bedrooms were not prewired for internet. My longtime friend, Eric Wagner, gave me my first wireless router as a birthday gift.
When we returned to California in 2009, we decided to be a cell phone only household — no land line. The problem was that we were AT&T customers that lived near the water, so our cell phone service was horrible. AT&T gave me a free mini-cell tower in exchange for agreeing to extend my service for one year. So when we are at home, our cell phones connect to the mini-cell instead of a satellite, and our conversations are delivered via the internet.
When we got an alarm system that same year since we had no land line, we connected our system to the security service via the internet. ADT gave me a connection module that we use in place of a phone line.
Also as part of moving into our house, we got two new HDTVs. Best Buy threw in two free Blu-ray players as part of the deal. These players connected to Blockbuster, Netflix, Pandora, and YouTube. I loved how Samsung realized that they were not in the DVD player business. They were in the entertainment delivery business. Back in 2009, the current technology for delivering movies was Blu-ray disks, but Samsung's player was forward-looking enough that it let me stream movies to the player instead.
In 2009 I became a Dish Network subscriber. At the time, I thought they had the best picture quality. Connecting the Hopper to the internet allows us to purchase pay-per-view events, but we have never done so.
We have iPads. When the first iPad came out, I thought it would be a flop. It wasn't a phone. What could you possibly use it for? I happened to visit the home of our CEO, Carl Bass, and he had one in his family room. He told me it never leaves the room. They just use it when watching TV. We were watching a football game and had a question about one of the referee's calls. Carl's son used the iPad to look up the official NFL rules. I saw how useful that was, and my wife and I each got one for Christmas. We answer emails and browse the web as we relax in our family room and watch sports.
We have since gotten newer iPads and use one of our original iPads as a music player. It has iTunes and Spotify on it and nothing else.
For Father's Day last year my children got me an XBox. I like to play Madden football.
I had always had a printer connected to my home PC. Then we wanted to print Southwest Airlines boarding passes from our iPads, so I got a wireless printer. This makes it easy for guests at our house to do the same without having to sit down at my personal computer which was little awkward for them anyway.
Like I mentioned last week, our most recent addition is the Sonos system. The BOOST unit could not be wireless, so I used a TP-Link setup to pass internet packets through my electrical wiring.
Unfortunately, our neighborhood has had some recent robberies. The modus operandi is that the criminals break a car window, take the garage opener, open the garage, and steal possessions from the garage. We are thankful they do not enter the homes. If they open our garage or enter our unit, I have strategically placed three Dropcams. I use the cloud service from Dropcam, so I can go back a week in time and review footage in the event of a burglary. One of the Dropcams is located in the garage where the wireless signal would not reach. I solved that with a Netgear wireless extender.

How has your home network changed over the years? Let us know at [email protected].

Networking is alive in the lab.

It is Alive in the Lab

This is a blog about the people, processes, thoughts, foresight, and opinions about technology from Autodesk.

June 09, 2015

How My Home Network Has Changed Over The Years

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