My cable modem will be 40+ feet away from several devices that need wired access to my LAN. There’s my PC right next to the modem, and then at least 2 devices on the other side of the house. I would prefer to have one cable running across the house, so can I plug one cable into a port in the router [probably this one here], run the cable across the house, plug it into a hub, and then split it between the devices over there?
I can’t simply connect the router to the cable modem with a 50 foot cable and place it near the devices because my PC (next to the modem) also needs to be connected, which would give me 2 wires running across the house anyway.
I’ve yet to ever use one of those home router/nat box/etc. devices. I know they’re not real routers in terms of their capabilities. So I’m thinking they may be hardwired to think one port = one connection/device, and therefore I couldn’t use a hub because the router wouldn’t send data for both devices down the same port.
I realize it’s a wireless router, but I probably won’t be using the wireless aspect for anything that can be hard wired.
So is it possible with those devices to run cable modem->router->50 foot cable->hub->2 devices?
That should work fine. Your router will happily assign each device a unique address on the subnet, and both should be able to connect to the internet through the cable modem no problem.
Hubs are pracitcally identical to switches for my purposes.
Edit: But since they’re so cheap anyway I might as well get one. I didn’t bother to make a switch/hub distinction because it wasn’t relevant to my question.
Most home users won’t notice a difference. When you have an internet connection with less than 10 mbps and a LAN of 100 mbps without a lot of local traffic, it doesn’t really matter that the box tying them all together is dumb. I have a switch and if it craps out, I’ll get another one, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone already having a hub to go buy a switch for a small home network.
I’ve also used spare wired/wireless routers for this purpose, mainly because a lot of people have spare wired ones after they switch to wireless. You just need to turn off DHCP.
