Share Internet access on your home networkIntroduction Sharing Internet access is widely held as the "killer app" for home networks. The logic goes like this: When we all had 56K modems, it was a no-brainer to buy one (at $20 a piece or so) for every computer in your house and let any of your family members dial up directly over the phone line to the Internet. Of course, you still had to fight over a phone line, but there wasn't a compelling financial reason to share your Internet access. Now high-speed, or broadband access, has changed all that. With the combined price of DSL/cable modem installation, equipment and service, it now has become prohibitive, if not impossible, to purchase that set up for every computer in your house. The answer, then, is to buy high-speed access equipment/service for one computer in the house and share that Internet access (as provided and allowed by each service provider) simultaneously with other computers. There are two basic ways to accomplish shared Internet access: hardware or software. On the hardware side, you typically use a piece of equipment between your dial-up/cable/DSL modem and your computer. This device, often known as a router or Internet gateway, connects to other computers on your network and then routes those connections out to the Internet. We've reviewed various routers including the Hawking FR24 (for wired network) and the Compex NP16 (for wireless networks) in our Hardware section. On the software side, you can use special software packages, often known as proxies, that run on the computer connected to the Internet (the "host") and that allow other computers ("clients") to share that access. We've reviewed various proxy packages in our Software section. The downside with software is that you need to keep the host computer turned on whenever any other computer on the network wants to get on the Internet. The big advantage with the software option for Microsoft Windows users is that, ever since Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows has included its own built-in proxy package called Internet Connection Sharing. With our bias at homePCnetwork.com always toward low-cost solutions, we wanted to provide a simple, step-by-step guide on setting up Internet Connection Sharing, or ICS for short. OK, Get On With It Let's proceed with sharing Internet access between two computers on our home network. For our purposes, we are going to use two computers connected via a basic Fast Ethernet network. If you need help setting that up, please start with our how-to on an Ethernet network. You'll also want a working TCP/IP connection between your computers, which we actually covered in our Mac to PC how-to. Also, we start with one computer connected to the Internet via a 56K dial-up modem. The actual steps to share the Internet access will be the same for anyone using a cable or DSL modem. We're also using Windows 98 Second Edition because a quick poll of visitors indicated that not many had switched to Windows ME. We'll cover several steps in this how to: In Step 1, Installing ICS, we install the Internet Connection Sharing feature on Windows 98SE (it usually doesn't install under a default installation). In Step 2, Configuring the Host, we start the Internet Connection Sharing wizard (which actually starts automatically after you install the program) and configure the host computer. In Step 3, Configuring the Client, we take the "client disk" created in Step 2 to the other computer on our network and run the program to configure the client for ICS. In Step 4, Finishing, we make some final changes to the setup (that aren't covered in the readme.txt file for ICS...so you'll only get it here) and you'll be up and running with shared Internet access. So, let's go on to Step 1.
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