Router or Hub in splitting my internet?

Question

What's the difference in using a router and a hub in splitting my internet to 2 computers? what are their advantages and disadvantages?

Answer 1

Routyer is what we call layer 3 or Network layer device. You Internet is provided through the layer 3 device and you can share you Internet or provide instructions to the Router on which device should get and not get connectivity through it.

Hub on the other hand is layer 1 device and you use that to extend your network. You can also use Router to do that also but Router is much better and more advance compared to Hub.

Answer 2

its a matter of more sophisticated electronics

Routers are now the cheapest way to go and are often on sale

Routers used to be thousands of dollars and were very difficult to set up

Not now

Simplest device is a hub itself

Like a cable tv splitter

Little electronics

Signal just flows

But no controls - lots of collision , bottlenecks and slow speeds

What goes where  ?

Next in line was a switch

It has more electronics

It can figure out , learn , what goes where internally and switch data from say user 1 on the network to user 4 - to speed it up

A switch is also called a "switching hub"  or a hub on steroids

A router has the most electronics

It is used to connect two networks - in most cases now the internet network of your isp and your home network

Routers have switches built into them

If a person is setting up a gaming network internally or say has a very fast network at a business then a stand alone switch and a router would be faster ( perhaps)  than a router with everything built in

in most cases a router is the best choice , are standardized and are on sale - whereas even switches seldom are

the two major brands of routers are linksys and dlink

all brands are fine

best deal is to get a wireless router on sale

If you do not wireless then turn the wireless setting to off or disabled

Here is a good resource for help with routers

http://www.portforward.com/english/route...

Answer 3

In basic things, hub is a dumb hardware, it's the 1st layer of OSI, so you can play with the features and the IP address for the clients must be set manually or from the DHCP server. Router is 3rd layer of OSI and it has a lot of features to play (depends on the router type) and it can also acts as a DHCP server so you don't need to have extra DHCP server