Router, switch or hub: Which one for your home network?
Obviously, more and more of you will need more than one PC at home. You need one to do the work you always fail to finish at the office. Your daughter says she needs a PC to chat with her friends for hours on end, and does not wish to be interrupted. Your wife has also learned the power of instant messaging, and she has decided to make the best of it to keep in touch with her friends across the country.
And that leaves you with at least three PCs. It is clearly not necessary to have three additional phone lines so that each of the PCs will have its own dial-up Internet access. If you already have a broadband connection, such as cable Internet service or ADSL, why not share it among all three computers and pay just one subscription every month?
The connection is easy. All you need is an Ethernet card on every PC and three or four pieces of UTP cable of sufficient length. Just remember that when you buy the UTP cables, you have to make sure that each of the wires in the cable is properly crimped and the plugs are properly installed. The store usually has the necessary tool to perform the test.
Now you need a black box that will not only connect the three PCs in a network, but also let them share the same Internet access. Each of the PCs has to be linked to the box with the UTP cable. You may have heard a lot about routers, hubs, bridges and switches, and wondered whether the black box you need is one of these.
Now let us see how they resemble or differ from each other. The hub is the simplest black box. All the data that it receives is forwarded to all of the other ports. There is no intelligence in a hub, because it is actually a repeater. Because of that, the more data transmitted over the hub, the slower the throughput because all the bits and bytes have to go through the queues -- like arriving passengers at our notorious Soekarno-Hatta International Airport.
A bridge basically lets data flow from one network to another. It is more like the Immigration lines at the international airport. If an arriving passenger does not have the necessary travel documents -- a valid passport and visa, he is not to be allowed to pass (at least that is how it is supposed to work). Similarly, if the data does not have the valid address that it wants to reach on the other side of the bridge, it will not be allowed to pass. We do not usually need a bridge for a home network.
A switch has a lot more intelligence than the two types of black boxes above. It has the ability to differentiate whether two computers need a faster data connection than another pair of computers, and provide the necessary bandwidth accordingly. Again, using the analogy of the airport, a switch has the capability to direct those important people to the VIP lines so that they can get out of the terminal faster.
A home network can use a switch, and the price is not much higher now than that of a hub. However, there is very little, if any, real benefit in using a switch at home. Unless, perhaps, you have a server and all the users on the other PCs access the applications directly from it.
A router is the most sophisticated of all the black boxes. If you use a router, such as the Compex NetPassage, you can share a single broadband Internet access -- cable or ADSL -- with multiple PCs. The router has to be configured in such a way so that it is recognized by the cable network, and then all the PCs should be set to dynamically obtain IP addresses.
The NetPassage 15 from Compex, for example, even provides the ability to block certain Internet applications based on the TCP/UDP port numbers. Should the number of workstations increase and you run out of ports on one router, you can stack another and connect the extra PCs to it. Again, in the case of Compex NetPassage 15, you can connect up to 253 PCs that will share a single Internet access.
What is the advantage of using a router over using one of the PCs as the Internet gateway and connecting it with the other PCs in the network with a hub? If you use a router, you will not need to leave the PC that serves as the gateway running 24 hours a day. In terms of performance, however, there would not be much difference, as the key factor is the speed of the cable or ADSL network. -- Zatni Arbi