Home network
computer network that facilitates communication among devices near a home
A home network, or home area network (HAN), is a computer network, specifically a local area network (LAN), that facilitates communication among devices within the close vicinity of a home. Devices capable of participating in this network, for example, smart devices such as network printers and handheld mobile computers, often gain enhanced emergent capabilities through their ability to interact. These additional capabilities can be used to increase the quality of life inside the home in a variety of ways, such as automation of repetitive tasks, increased personal productivity, enhanced home security, and easier access to entertainment. Other than a regular LAN that is centralized and uses Ethernet, Wi‑Fi, and Internet Protocol (IP), a home network may also make use of direct peer-to-peer methods as well as non-IP protocols such as Zigbee and Bluetooth.
Infrastructure devices
Certain devices in a home network are primarily concerned with enabling or supporting the communications of the kinds of end devices residents more directly interact with. Unlike their data center counterparts, these networking devices are compact and passively cooled, aiming to be as hands-off and non-obtrusive as possible.
A gateway establishes physical and data link layer connectivity to a WAN provided by a service provider. Home routers provided by internet service providers (ISP) usually have the modem integrated within the unit. It is effectively a client of the external DHCP servers owned by the ISP.
A router establishes network layer connectivity between a wide area network (WAN) and the local area network of the residence. For IPv4 networking, the device may also perform the function of network address translation establishing a private network with a set of independent addresses for the network.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Home network” is computer network that facilitates communication among devices near a home. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Home, network and computer, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1324289. The Library of Congress control number is sh00000230. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Home network” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.