I’m flailing about looking for a solution to my sometimes not working network hub in my small office.
My biz partners and I work on a wired Ethernet network which is connected to the outside work via a cable modem and a small 8 port hub. The hub feeds another similar repeating hub in order that we can fit our 10 devices onto our local network.
Since the primary network hub appears to be giving up the ghost soon I’m in somewhat of a hurry to replace it. In my perfect world there would exist a network hub with 16-24 ports that costs less than $200.
My attempts to find such a beast are not working. It seems like there are tons of hubs with 4 ports at a price around $50 - $100 and a bunch of 10-24 port switches that are in the same range but there doesn’t appear to be anything with the ports I need that will also provide access to my internet connection.
Am I going about this wrong? Should I just buy a cheap hub and slap a cheap switch behind it? There’s nothing mission critical about our usage that is harmed by some latency increase. We basically have a group of computers that need access to the internet.
I think you have a misconception, a switch will work for sharing an internet connection just like a hub. In fact hubs are disappearing because there’s no longer a good reason for them since switch prices have come down so much.
You do need a router in the mix though. I assume your modem is also a router.
How dare you say I have a misconception. I am in fact, thoroughly confused. I would love to have just a misconception.
The router I have now provides DHCP duties for my internal network. From my slim understanding of this stuff I assume that I will still need that in my network and a 16 port switch simply won’t do that.
Without the DHCP won’t I have to manually configure all of the computers and devices on the network?
The cable modem is a standard Time Warner issued product. It comes with no instructions and I always assumed that it would not do the DHCP duties.
If I could just plug in the switch to the cable modem that would be great but if any setup process is required with the modem then I might have a problem coming up with the instructions to do that.
Thanks - I was hoping that I could do that and it wouldn’t be too much trouble.
I had guessed that that switching speeds and throughput of the switch has such low latency that putting a switch downstream would be OK but my (lack of) understanding network configurations made me doubt it.
The thing is, the ethernet connections and the TCP/IP connections are essentially two separate things (network layers), in that the TCP/IP part is pretty much unconcerned to whether it’s being run on wireless ethernet, cable ethernet, token-ring, FDDI, smoke signals, jungle drums, etc…
So as long as your computers are on the same LAN as the router, they should get DHCP provided addresses from your router and be connected to each other and to the Internet.
Here’s a quick and dirty (and only mostly accurate) explanation of hubs, switches and routers.
Hubs connect all attached devices to a shared physical bus, kind of splicing all the wires together with a huge wirenut. Because the devices have to share a single medium (i.e. the wirenut splice), each device has to wait for the medium to be empty before it can send anything.
With switches, each device gets it’s own channel, kind of like a telephone or a mailbox. Device A can talk to device B at the exact same moment C is talking to D. This means no waiting for a shared medium to clear. Also because each device has separate channels for sending and receiving data it can go much faster.
Routers are a completely different animal. Routers connect networks (i.e. sets of switches, an internet connection, etc.) together, and are all about addressing. Your router knows how to reach every IP address (which is one part of the network configuration your DHCP server provides) in existence*. If a device wants to connect to anything beyond the local switch, it has to talk to the router (similar to pressing 9 for an outside line when on the company switchboard).
Today, we use switches to build networks of several (usually a few dozen) devices each and connect those networks together with routers.
In the past, we’d use hubs instead of switches and use something called a bridge (which is just a switch with only a few ports) to break up large or overly-congested networks (that shared medium could get very busy).
to be fair, for all but a handful of addresses, your router simply queries the routers at your internet provider.
I was using a router recently that had a limit of 6 wireless devices…this was a hard limit and so the router was no good for us.
Now the count of wired clients isn’t usually limited like that but routers may have a spec saying how many client PC’s/devices they are intended to support… as a rough guide… The number of physical ports is not that spec ! Also they have a maximum throughput , so more expensive routers may be better for the future.