What's the difference between a Hub, a Switch and a Router?

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Execelent forum!!! I gained a lot reading all the FAQ section.
I'm opening an internet cafe soon, with around 40 PCs and might go for 60 PCs or 80 PCs if the business run well.
My questions are:
1. I wonder which kind of router should I get? NAT router?
2. Should I buy 4 individual 12-port-router in order to connect all the 40 PCs together? Or what is your recommendation? (I want high speed--100Mbps, security, reliable and cost effective)
3. If one day, my internet cafe's server is down, and all the PC cannot connect to the Internet, what can I do to overcome this situation?
4. Any other recommendation of the network for my Internet cafe? (Basically for gaming purposes)

Thank you very much LEO. Your help is very VERY much appreciated.

The bigger question you need to ask yourself first is how fast will your connection to the internet be?

Then I'm curious if you'll be supporting wireless, or if you'll be entirely wired?

Certainly a NAT solution makes sense, but how best to arrange it really depends on the expected usage and traffic. Will the heaviest traffic all be local, or internet based?

Leo

My connection to the Internet would be ADSL.
The trafic would be Internet base and LAN base, meaning gamer can play games in LAN as well as in the Internet. We would like to provide gamers to play games in Battle.net (Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, World of Warcraft). The connection, I would say it's entirely wired.

Thank you again, and apologize for the unclear questions. >.<

Well, first realize that with that many machines, if there's any serious internet gaming, surfing or whatever going on you're going to saturate your ADSL very quickly. However using ADSL means that any decent NAT router capable of handling that many machines is not going to be your bottleneck - the ADSL will be.

SO, while I'm no expert in this size of installation, I see it heading two ways: a single NAT router handling your internet connection, and then enough switches to handle the local traffic. There are NAT routers available that will do fail-over ... when the connection drops they can actually make a different connection, or dial up a backup connection via ISDN or reagular dialup. But if you thought your ADSL was slow... the dialup solutions are even slower.

The other direction this could go is to get a single high-end router. This is what most IT departments would end up with ... a single peice of equipment (perhaps a redundant pair) that would handle both your NAT, as well as appropriate routing, and have the 40+ connections you need. This would probably be your most reliable/robust situation, but would be expensive, and would need a network engineer to come in and set up properly.

Highering a network engineer to come in and consult with you might be some money well spent anyway. Especially if this is critical to your business. As you point out, you'll have a support issue should anything break down, and it would be critical for you to have a relationship with someone who knows your setup, and can help you resolve issues quickly as they arrise.

Best of luck!

Leo

Thanks Leo, thanks a lot for your advice. I think that was the longest answer you made in this section. Again, thanks for your time and thanks for your luck, really needs that :)

Be your website the best in Internet.

hi leo, great site, thanks for the help.
my current network consists of a dsl modem connected to the internet, a 4 port (ethernet router) with NAT, and a 4 port switch (i needed the extra ports as i have 5 computers hooked up plus a living room dvd/divx/mp3 player which is ethernet capable as well.
now i want to add wifi. i was planning to hook up a wireless access point via ethernet. but for about the same price i can get a wifi router/accesspoint/4port switch, with better features. can i hook up the second wifi router to my existing network, perhaps "dumbing it down" to act as an access point/switch, but not do any of the routing?

Depends on the brand, of course, but almost certainly. Turn off the feature that provides DHCP. You may also have to not use the uplink port, but rather connect everything through the regular ports.

Good luck!

Leo

Hi Leo.

Thanks for your great site. My question is if I have a router and i log on with only one of the computers will then they all have acces to the internet? and won't I need a different configuration in the nic for loggin in and for sharing files in the lan?

The logon question is dependant totally on how your ISP works. You'll have to ask them. File sharing among machines on your LAN should simply work ... at worst you might have to install the NETBUEI protocol, but most times that isn't even neccessary. Regardless, you'll need only one configuration for your NIC.

Leo

Hey Leo,

Thanks a lot for this explaination. I always thought I knew the difference between a hub and router, but I guess not. :P Now I know. :)

-PcH

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