How To build a Mobile Accessible SoHo Network?

Small office/Home office network: If you are reading this, it's probably because you have taken interest in building one for yourself or maybe you want to help someone to build theirs or better still to learn and recommend?. However, either way, it's cool and pretty much necessary at least in this time that the world is facing a global pandemic #Covid19. Now SoHo has been around for a very long time and it stands for small office/home office which refers to the category of business or cottage industry that involves from 1 to 10 workers. Amidst the global pandemic that's causing a lot of damage to businesses and the world's economy in general, some businesses have decided to shut down while others have resolved to online platforms with their employees working directly from home. It's pretty much of a good measure to get everyone especially employees, stay safe yet ensuring business continuity. For the most interesting part of it, if you are a sole-propriety or an individual who owns a small business that obviously needs to keep running then you definitely need to build a Soho network. It could be in a small space in your house, one of your rooms, etc. This is most applicable to individuals who want to start a personal business or intend to work independently or remotely with large organizations from home. If you fall in either category, you probably need something like the figure below.

Again, I will like to add that, our home settings may differ and will also depend on our individual needs or perhaps the types of work we do. for some, a single computer is ok, others will need a lot more than just that and what if your home space doesn't permit all your equipment to be aligned in one position? definitely, you need to place them in different locations of the house and that will mean building a network for easy accessibility. How to do that is what I am going to share with you in this article and it's pretty much very easy. For someone like me who's a tech guy, I can access all of my home networked devices from my phone. you can as well do the same. We'll walkthrough. feel free to comment, share and subscribe to this blog and don't forget to contact me if you need help. Great!

What you need?

• Keep in mind that for a centralized network, it's good and necessary you implement a server, except of course you don't really want that and making or building a server is easy, I will make that in a subsequent post.
• A hub or a switch: a switch is highly recommended if you have multiple devices that you intend to use. there are smaller switches with fewer ports that are also very cheap. Here are 4 to 8 port switches ranging between 18$ to 40$ you can get.
• Straight through cables that will be connecting devices to your switch. with this be cautious to know the measuring distance between the device and your switch. you can make one for your self or an already made one from eBay. there are as well network cable specialists who can help you with this.
• Internet connection( Not mandatory) but if you need to access or control your devices remotely or if your purpose of a home office is to work remotely online then you probably need this.

However,
To save yourself from all these hurdles and get things real quick, you may prefer to use a wireless connection which of course you may already have at home, but if you don't, contact your ISP and they will present you with options to obtaining a home wireless network. For desktop computers, I will recommend buying a dual-band USB 3.0 Wifi adapter so that they can easily connect to the home internet connection. its plug and play thus very easy to install. all devices will easily connect to the router's SSID. This dual-band antenna is also capable of converting a wire connection on a computer to wireless so that wireless devices can connect. it's a very good engineering that costs less.

Procedure:

• Ensure devices are set in their respective locations or positions
• Perform all the physical connections, for wired connections one end of the straight-through cable connects to the switch ports and the other to the network port of the particular device.

• Give IP addresses. For private networks, you can give your device any IP range but they should fall under the same subnet. This is not applicable in the case of wireless networks
• Ensure network discovery is turned on so that you can see all connected devices
• Finally, test the connection by pinging the Ip addresses

If you need a more centralized setup, install a server operating system on the computer you wish to use and configure its active directory, users and computers, and domain settings. However, if you just wish to be able to access your computer from mobile from Any location, I recommend downloading
Splashtop personal from play store on your phone and Install the streamer on your computer. Once you sign up with your email account you can access your computer from any location on your mobile device.
Splashtop Business makes its lot better with more features as it allows multiple users to connect to the same computer, a user connecting to multiple likewise, do a whole lot of things from remote locations. I will talk more about Splashtop in my subsequent post about the best remote platforms. like Splashtop personal download the app on your phone and head for the streamer at splashtop.com which you will download on your desktop.
This setup gives you a whole Soho centralized network from your mobile. whether you work from home or on the go, you can keep your eyes on whatever happens on your home computer. personally, I access everything from my computers including transferring information from one computer to another or helping on a remote project or task just using Splashtop.
Take note that to ensure you can access your computer remotely at any time, your computer must not be set to sleep when idle.

Another option is to download Microsoft remote desktop assistant from Google play store. Once installed on your phone heard to your computer and download the Microsoft remote desktop assistant. Install and configure your PC  for remote access. but this is only supported by the following systems:
Windows 10, Windows 7 Enterprise, Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows 8 Enterprise, Windows 8 Pro.
Since you can now access your computer remotely, I will recommend you install Glasswire on your computer so that you can monitor every network activity when you remotely logon to your computer