Six months ago, people gave you funny looks if you told them you had a home LAN. Today, home networking kits are among the hottest items on trade show floors and in retail stores. The reason is simple: Now that home PC prices have come crashing down, many users have purchased second or third PCs for the home. In most cases the hand-me-down machines ends up in the kids' rooms -- with no printer and no dedicated phone line for Internet access. Of course, it never fails that just as Mom sits down at the PC to check her e-mail, one of the kids needs to do some research on the Web or print out a homework assignment. Add to the mix all the business professionals who regularly shuttle laptop PCs to and from the office and the urgent need to share resources starts to make sense.
That's where the home local area network comes in. If all the PCs in your house are connected to a LAN, any PC on the network can use the printer, share a device (such as a Zip Drive), or transfer files simply by using the networking functions built into Windows 95 and 98. Even more alluring, only one machine needs an Internet connection to give all PCs on the LAN a gateway to the Web. So your kids can surf the Web while you read e-mail, and either of you can print to the printer from your local machine.
Along with the growing need, other factors have come together to make the time ripe for home LANs. First and foremost, prices for the kits are attractive to home purchasers--as low as $90 for a kit to connect two machines. Also important for the home market, some entries are easy to install and require no new cabling; they work over your home's existing phone or electrical wires, or through wireless radio-frequency (RF) transmitters.
For our testing, we gathered 11 networking kits designed specifically for the home and small-office marketplace. They include a variety of wired and wireless technologies, ranging from reliable old 10BaseT Ethernet to the latest RF, power-line, and phone-line networking technologies.