Hub or Switch

[L8CS]

I'm working up a proposal to network an upstairs 3 PC office group to an exsisting downstairs 4 PC LAN that still uses dial-up connections at each workstation. My proposal also includes a conversion to DSL an to do away with them using a single AOL account for all users.....Yeah I know

Anyway, I plan to replace the downstairs 4 port NetgGear Hub with a 10/100 8 port switch and in turn uplink that to the DSL router and then the Modem. My problem lies with the upstairs workgroup. I know that I need a Hub to tie the 3 upstairs PC's into their own workgroup and then uplink that to the switch downstairs. Would it be more efficent to use another 10/100 8 port switch upstairs and then uplink that to the downstairs switch or would a standard Hub do the trick?

 

[madwok]

If you can afford, replace switches where you had hubs . Much faster . Remember to put them on the same VLAN and turn on Spanning Tree if you have a small network like you describe .

 

[ttn1]

It really depends on the traffic on your network. With 3 machine I think a hub will be fine. I would move
the hub upstairs and use the switch on your downstairs network. I seriously doubt if you will have any throughput
problems with that small a network. And your connection for the upstairs people would be through a single
cable anyway, which means the would only have 100Mbits of bandwidth anyway. A switch would only help for
transfers between their three computers.

 

[L8CS]

I was trying to save them some money by utilizing the old 4 port Hub upstairs which I think is a Netgear DS104, but that would limit their expansion abilities down the road. I'll probably just use LinkSys or Netgear SOHO stuff so the costs will be low anyway. The upstairs are just executive offices so there won't be networked printers or servers.

Thanks

 

[L8CS]

<<A switch would only help for transfers between their three computers. >>

I don't think the upstairs group would suffer enough collisions to warrant the upgrade to a switch but the number of ports could be a concern. Don't you lose a regular port when switching over to uplink mode? On the Netgear DS104, it has 4 open ports with the uplink switch, so I guess I would lose the third and fourth port in uplink mode. And if that's the case, I would probably have to upgrade to a 6 or 8 port Hub ayway just to utilize the uplink.