If you live in a location that offers decent cable service, accessing the Internet (also called the Web) is as simple as running any other appliance. However, if you live in a rural area or a remote wilderness retreat, or if you haven’t used the Internet very much in the past but want to start now, you might want to gain a little bit of web-related wisdom so that you can get the most out of the experience.
Choices, Choices!
If you want to get Internet access in your home and you happen to live in a large city, you have several choices, all of them good. Cable TV providers commonly bundle their services so that you can have Internet access (and sometimes landline telephone service as well). Usually, you’ll find that cable Internet connections offer the highest data speeds, measured in megabits per second (Mbit/s), where a megabit represents a million (1,000,000) individual digits of information. Wireless is a little slower than cable, followed by satellite service and finally dialup, which is excruciatingly slow for today’s Internet applications. If you live in a truly progressive town, you might be able to get fiber-optic service directly into your house; this mode is faster still, in some cases offering speeds in excess of a gigabit per second (Gbit/s) where a gigabit represents a billion (1,000,000,000) digits of data!
Did You Know?
Kansas City, Missouri and its sister town in Kansas worked out a deal with the Internet giant Google in 2012 to provide fiber-optic Internet service all the way down to
residential homes and small businesses. More metro areas will doubtless follow their lead in years to come. Check out the availability of so-called fiber to the home in your locale. If it’s available and you can afford it, I recommend that you subscribe
straightaway. (It’ll spoil you in a hurry.)
Wireless service can provide good connection speeds in large cities, but it’s rarely as fast as cable.
In order to use a wireless Internet service, you’ll probably have to get it from a cell phone provider.
Most cell phone providers these days offer bundle deals in which you can get a phone set along with wireless Internet service, but some of these plans are quite expensive, and some service providers limit the amount of data that you can upload and download per month. If you want to use the Internet only for electronic mail (e-mail) or casual Web browsing, this type of service might suffice for you.
However, if you intend to download lots of movies or watch a lot of videos, or if you expect to use the Internet for online gaming, you’ll do better with cable (or ideally, fiber-optic) service.
In rural locations too far removed from cell phone towers to get good wireless Internet service (or if the local cell phone provider doesn’t include wireless service in any of their packages), you’ll probably want to opt for a satellite Internet connection. This mode works like satellite TV, and uses a dish antenna similar to the ones you see in satellite TV installations. The important difference is the
fact that with a satellite Internet connection, your dish antenna doesn’t merely receive the signals. It transmits signals too, all the way up to a satellite that hovers thousands of miles above the earth! For that reason, you’ll need to have a professional technician install your system and align the dish
because the antenna alignment is more critical for satellite Internet than it is for TV reception.
The mode of last resort is a dialup connection, in which you use a landline telephone system to access the Internet. It’s so slow that most people will find it useless for Web browsing these days;
video and streaming audio are out of the question. However, if it’s all you can afford, it’s better than nothing. Be forewarned, however: Some telecommunications companies have begun to talk about getting rid of landline telephone service altogether. When and if that day comes, you won’t be able to get dialup Internet service at all.
Modems
The term modem is an acronym that derives from the first letters of the words “modulator” and
“demodulator.” In technical terms, those words describe precisely what the thing does. It modulates (or encodes) signals going out from your computer into the wilds of the Web, and it demodulates (or decodes) signals coming in from the Web to your computer. Several different types of modems exist, and the type that you get will depend on how you want to connect to the Internet. A modem can link a computer to the same cable system as you get your TV service from. Some modems are designed to connect directly to a network of optical fibers. Still others contain a small radio transceiver for wireless or satellite access. The most primitive modems work with a telephone landline to get you a dialup connection.
Most new notebook and tablet computers come equipped with internal wireless modems, so you don’t have to think about them at all in order to use them. In fact, with some computers, you have to actively disable the internal wireless modem if you want to make sure that your computer doesn’t automatically connect to the Internet without your knowledge! To take advantage of the Internet with a wireless-equipped computer or tablet device, you can go to a so-called wireless hotspot, follow the instructions provided with your device, and get online. Most public libraries, and a lot of restaurants and bars, provide wireless hotspots. So do hotels, airports, bus terminals, and some retail
establishments.
If you want to use the Internet with a cable or satellite system, you’ll need an external modem.
Your cable provider will probably be willing to supply you with one as part of your monthly TV-and-Internet subscription. They’ll sell or rent you a cable modem. It’s a box roughly the size and shape of a paperback novel, and it sits or stands on your desk next to your computer. Figure 6-9 shows a cable modem on the author’s desk, sitting right underneath the base unit for a cordless phone set. (The upright box to the left of the phone and modem is a wireless router, which we’ll talk about in a moment.)
FIGURE 6-9 A cable modem, a cell-phone base unit, and a wireless router. Note the cup with the writing instruments for size comparison.
Ever since the birth of the Internet, modems have done the same thing: convert signals from a form that travels over a communications medium to a form that your computer can “understand,” and vice-versa. They do it faster now than they did in the early years; that’s all. Your computer works with binary digital signals that occur in bits (technically binary digits) that can represent either the number 1 or the number 0, but nothing else. These signals are rapidly fluctuating direct currents. In order for binary (two-state) digital information to go over a communications system, the data must be
converted to some form of AC signal. That signal can be an electric current in a cable made out of ordinary copper wire, a light beam or infrared beam in an optical fiber, or a radio wave through the atmosphere or outer space.
Routers
A router is a device that allows you to access a single Internet connection with more than one
computer, although you can use a router if you have only one computer. Routers come in two types:
hard-wired and wireless. To use a router, you plug it into your modem in place of a computer, activate the router according to the instruction manual, and then access the Internet from your computers
through the router and the modem combined. Routers will work with cable or satellite Internet
connections. You can use a router with a wireless Internet service, too, although there’s little reason to do that unless you want the router to act as a firewall between your computers and the Internet.
Quick Question, Quick Answer
• What’s a firewall? What does it do?
• A firewall is a system that helps protect your computers (and, increasingly, e-book readers and cell phones) against hackers, who might try to gain access to your devices and use them for nefarious purposes. All good computers make use of software
firewalls, which are programs that either come standard with the machine or that you can install. A router offers extra protection, over and above a software firewall,
because it keeps nosey hackers from easily “seeing” your computer by remote control over the Internet. It’s a little like shutting the window blinds at night to keep peepers from looking in at you! For this reason, you will sometimes hear that a router can serve as a hardware firewall.
With a hard-wired router, you’ll need to connect every computer to it using a cord called an Ethernet cable, which looks like a telephone landline cord but has more wires. You’ll also need an Ethernet cable to hook your router up to your modem. Hard-wired routers aren’t convenient if you want to use computers all over the house, and especially if you want to move them around freely.
Hard-wired routers are out of the question if you want to use wireless-equipped tablet devices or e-book readers, such as the iPad, Kindle Fire, or Nook Tablet. These devices lack Ethernet ports (jacks for Ethernet cables), but an increasing number of them do have tiny wireless modems that you can use with any wireless router in a home or business.
Fact or Myth?
If anyone tells you that all e-book readers will work with wireless routers or wireless Internet connections, don’t believe it! Some of them require you to use a computer to download your e-books, and then transfer them to the reader itself, using a special connecting cable. If you are interested in buying an e-book reader and you want it to have wireless capability, make sure that you read the specifications carefully to avoid disappointment.
Because of their convenience and ease of installation, most people use wireless routers when they want to assemble and use in-home local area networks (called LANs by techies). That way, they can have multiple computers and tablet devices accessing the Internet all over the house. Figure 6-10 is a block diagram of a wireless LAN serving two computers and two tablet devices. (You can add more devices simply by bringing them within range of the router and switching them on.) The little triangle symbols represent antennas, which are usually inside the devices so you can’t see them. The dotted gray lines represent radio waves that travel between your wireless router and the individual devices.
Most wireless routers have a maximum range of 100 feet or so, and although that might seem like a limitation, it’s actually a good thing. If wireless routers had a much greater range than that, it would increase the risk that unauthorized people might get into your home LAN, especially if you live in a large city or in an apartment or condominium building. Wireless routers require passwords for access, but that security provision can’t guarantee that some smart kid won’t hack into your LAN anyway.
FIGURE 6-10 A home computer network with a modem, wireless router, two computers, and two tablet devices. The little triangle symbols represent the internal antennas in the router, computers, and tablets.
Did You Know?
Although you can use more than one device at a time in a wireless network, you’ll notice that they’ll slow down if you have too many of them going at once. That’s because the router must allocate the data from the modem among the devices like slicing up a pie.
The modem gets only a certain amount data from the service provider; adding a router can’t make your modem “suck any more data” from the Internet.