Turning your home network into a wireless environment can be extremely liberating. The freedom to pay bills online on a Sunday morning as you sit in bed, pulling up recipes on your PC in the kitchen, and simply not having to be restricted by wires makes it all worthwhile for me.Some people become intimidated when they hear the terms: home network or wireless connectivity, but both of these are really straight forward and simple to understand. Home networks are as simple or complicated as you make them and the term really only refers to the devices you have in your home that connect with one another. An example of a simple home network would be a PC, modem and printer. If these are connected without the use of wires, it then becomes a wireless home network.Before setting up your wireless home network it’s best to spend some time thinking about what you’d like to accomplish. Come up with a plan and try to imagine how your needs may grow over the next year or so.Do you want connectivity in every room, trying to connect a printer or gaming station, setting up surveillance cameras that communicate with your cell phone? The configurations are almost limitless, but if this is your first experience with wireless connectivity I suggest you start small and go from there.There are a few key points that you need to remember:1. Always secure your wireless network with a password2. The wireless signal range of a single device will vary from home to home and variables such as wall depth and layout of the house will impact the signal3. Remember that wireless devices can often conflict with the frequencies of others within range4. Certain devices will continue to draw bandwidth when not in use but connected to the network. An example would be a PS3 gaming console5. Ensure you have adequate bandwidth to support all of the new extras that you’ve added to your network, that Apple TV, iPad and XBOX all require bandwidth. If you purchase a 1MB package, that bandwidth is distributed among all devices connected to the network at any one time, and depending on how each of those devices is being used, can result in a less than favourable experience for one or more of the users.If you’re interested in learning more about how to get started, drop by the BTC booth (#52) at the Coldwell Banker Home Show on February 17 & 18.Next week we’ll start to take a look at devices used for wireless home networking.