Week Two: Describing a Network

The Baron family private network is a wireless router network for a family home in Canberra. It services two adults, one of whom studies and works from home, and two children. There are two smartphones, two iPads, one smart television, one Xbox, and one laptop connected. It uses the star topology, with a router which devices are connected to either by Ethernet (television and Xbox), or wirelessly (see diagram below). Users save documents and photographs requiring long term storage on an external hard drive or on their email servers (OneDrive and Google Photos). An Alogic USB-C portable docking station is used for any USB or USB-C port requirements.

One drawback of this wireless network is the security required for work in the public service, a necessity of one stakeholder. To overcome this issue, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) is utilised to connect the laptop to a separate Internet Protocol (IP) address, establishing a secure and encrypted connection (Symanovich, 2020).

The users are extremely happy with the network since its inception in 2017. They can use all devices all over the house and have no problem streaming large amounts of data for gaming and viewing.

The biggest frustration with this network is the interference of the microwave on the wireless internet.  Because the wireless internet and the microwave use the same frequency of 2.4 GHz (Kruszelnicki, 2012), one user often cannot view her episode of ‘Bluey’ whilst her mother cooks dinner. The user’s father has often suggested an upgrade to 5 GHz to prevent this interference, but to date this has not been implemented.

References

Kruszelnicki, K.S. (2012, September 25). WiFi frozen? Blame the microwave oven. ABC Science. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/09/25/3595484.htm

Symanovich, S. (2020). What is a VPN?. Retrieved from https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-privacy-what-is-a-vpn.html