The main reason for doing that is the possibility of simultaneously connecting a number of devices to the same Internet access provided by the service provider.
In a household, different members of the family can have simultaneous access to the Internet with their own devices: computers, smart phones, tablets and other smart devices that can be found today in any household.
In a small office, all the employees can connect simultaneously to the Internet with their computers.
Also, some devices can be shared across the LAN. For example printers, or Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices.
The local network could also host some specialized servers, like a database in an office environment, …show more content…
This is the network device that assigns the IP addresses to all other devices in the same local network or the same subnet. These IP addresses can be automatically generated, within the range of the assigned subnet, or can be fixed IP addresses, or IP addresses that are always assigned to the same network device. These are sometimes called reserved IP addresses.
3) A NAT server, or Network Address Translation server. This server translates the IP addresses of each local devices to the single address assigned by the service provider to your modem. Vice versa, when a packet comes in from the outside, it converts the single address back into the address of the device that is really supposed to receive the packet. This device is also useful from the perspective of security, because it shields the whole local network from the outside world, so from the outside world it is not possible to know how many devices are available in the local network and it is more difficult to reach them.
4) A VPN server, or Virtual Private Network server. This can be used to securely reach the local network from the Internet, using a dedicated channel where all the packets going back and forth are encrypted.
5) A Media Server, usually supporting the DLNA standard. Such service is able to easily distribute your media contents across all the devices in your