A Local Area Network for a Small Office This LAN starts simply ? shared Ethernet, with a pair of servers and an analog modem connecting employees to the Internet. Employees can share documents, presentations, spreadsheets or customer reports between computers; they can dial up the Internet for occasional research; they can communicate via e-mail; the business can save money by sharing printers, modems and hard-drive storage between users. dth ? 100 megabits per second.