In the modern home, the queue for the internet is becoming as constant a cause of impatience as the one for the bathroom. A new survey reveals that at peak times of day, one in three UK homes has two or more family members vying to go online. Yet a solution is at hand. One of the principal advantages of an always-on broadband connection over dial-up is that it can be spread easily around the house over a wireless (WiFi)network. If the connection speed is fast enough, several people can have their snouts in the trough without hogging all the speed or paying for extra phone lines.

Rafie Hannona, 21, is an economics student who swiftly realised the cost benefits of sharing a superfast 8mbps connection with his folks. “I grew tired of waiting to get onto the computer that was connected to broadband,” he says. “I set up a wireless network so that we could all use the web at the same time.” For £30 a month, everyone else at their home in Ealing, west London, enjoys the Broadband 8000 feed from UK Online.

His parents, who moved from Iraq to Scotland before settling in London, are also converts to the web, and his younger brother Fadie is as obsessed with digital life as any 16-year-old. They are all hungry for bandwidth so they can pursue their interests online without friction.

Arguments are a common reason for families buying a second computer. When the broadband supplier Bulldog commissioned a YouGov poll last month, it found that one in three couples argues over the time partners spend on the internet, though it’s not clear whether people want to go online themselves or simply wish their partners would log off and come to bed. A tangled web indeed.

What has made life easier this year is that most broadband suppliers have followed BT’s lead in providing a fast 2mbps connection for the price we had been paying for a standard 512kbps ADSL connection (typically £18 per month from BT, Tiscali, Wanadoo and others listed at www.adslguide.org; there are cable deals with a wide range of connection speeds from NTL or Telewest). Everyone in a family home or a student house, and in small businesses where workers need to stay in touch with colleagues abroad, can enjoy a seriously fast feed on one bill. Even faster connections — 4-8mbps — are rapidly coming down in price, and, though they are not universally available across the UK, promise better value to come.

“Mum loves scouting out holiday bargains and exotic locations. Dad’s a doctor and reads a lot of journals online to keep up to date with new treatments,” Rafie says. “I’m into downloading games demos, and some of them, like Battlefield 2, take up nearly 1GB. That’s huge, but with a fast connection it comes down pretty quickly, without having any real effect on what other people are doing. Fadie can still be blasting people online, Dad’s doing his research, and all the time this huge file is coming down the line.”

As people increasingly work or, at the very least, check e-mails from home, and a new generation of online console games takes root in our living rooms, networks grow ever more cost-effective. The Hannonas are typical of an emerging breed connecting multiple computers in the home: they have two main desktops, a laptop and a PlayStation2, which Fadie uses for online gaming “all the time”.

Research conducted by the London School of Economics suggests that one in three 9 to 19-year-olds now has more than one computer at home as parents shunt old computers into children’s bedrooms when the main family machine is replaced. However, a computer without internet access is pretty pointless. WiFi pumps your fast net connection to all your PCs or Macs and connects various pieces of electronic kit, from printers to palmtops to PlayStations, wherever they are in the house. Once these devices are chatting to each other wirelessly, they immediately ease your workload. From the comfort of the sofa, for example, you can select pictures of little Molly that are stored on a laptop, and they will appear on the printer in the study. Those MP3 music files on the main computer can be accessed from a laptop in the dining room, so you can stream a dinner party’s worth of music to your hi-fi and on to speakers around the home, choosing to skip tracks from the notebook ’s keyboard or, in some cases, a remote control.

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Wireless options are starting to appear in all manner of devices, including smart televisions: the £1,050 Philips Streamium 23iF9946, for example, will show off your home movies or photos.

“I have a Freeview television card on my main computer, but sometimes I don’t want to watch television in the study,” Rafie says. “I take the laptop into my bedroom and stream programmes onto that — it’s like having an extra set. I simply record shows on the main computer, then watch them over the network anywhere, even in the garden, on the laptop.”

Setting up a home network requires reasonably little hardware. Each com-puter connects through a wireless adaptor, which is standard on most of today’s laptops and can be plugged into a PC or older notebook. As a gateway to the web, you can buy either a stand-alone router, which requires an additional modem, or a combined modem-router to act as a high-tech set of pigeonholes directing data to the relevant computer.

Networks are easy to set up, thanks to improved software that walks you through the whole process with wizards. It’s a tad fiddly — and, frankly, easier with Apple computers than Windows-based machines — but you need to do it only once. To get started, attach your computer to the modem/router and set the system up through a browser window, then you are free to unplug it and connect wirelessly to the web. You must tell all the computers on the network where to find a signal and tell the router which computers should be allowed to access the internet.

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