good hub...

[parlee]

my friend is hosting a summer long LAN and the hub we have now doesnt handle more than 4 people on the network... we think its the hub but it could be otehrwise, he has the best linksys router, with wireless, out there... the hub is a crap netgear that my other friend got for free... he has 3mbps charter and with 5 people our pings jump to 280 in css, with 4 the ping is 30... so can anyone suggest a good router thats relitavly cheap? a 4 person hub will be enough but more ports the better, as long as the price is still reasonable... also doesnt anyone think that the internet just cant handle 5 computers? he used to host lans with 5 people and didnt lag so i ruled it to be the hub since thats the only thing thats changed..

 

[blue68f100]

Move away from residential router and move up to bussiness class, like a netgear FVS-338. Its a 8 port vpm router with 90mbps through put.

 

[parlee]

do u think that the router/hub are the limiting factors in the LAN or do u think that the internet is too slow? 3mbps is the fastest in our area...

 

[blue68f100]

The limiting factor is you ISP. You say 3mbps down, what is you up link speed. May be as low as 256k uplink. Check out your bandwidth with Speedtest located on the bottom rt of page.

 

[parlee]

i duno what his is because this isnt my problem but im assuming the upload is 120kb, my friend who have the same interent got 2.8 mbps and 120kb upload... so maybe the upload is the problem?

 

[Captain-M]

Unless you are in a corporate environment, hubs are not used as much these days. Switches are better nowadays, and are replacing hubs. Secondly, if two PC network connections are only 10 base-T, then a switch will compensate the bandwidth automatically, hubs do not. You can get switches up to 24 port and can daisy-chain as well, but rarely in home environment.

 

[mikeyp410]

Exactly... a switch should cure all your issues. A hub is too dumb of a piece of equipment.

 

[parlee]

whats the difference? i didnt even think of a hub

 

[mikeyp410]

A hub is just a simple multi connect and uses all of the bandwith with a multi broadcast. a switch uses 10/100/1000 depending per port. and broadcasts to the specific port, once again depending on the switch. normal everyday worgroup switches will have the 10/100 per port compared to enterprise/bizz class switches that seperate broadcasts per domains. Pretty much you will get more speed with a switch then you will with a hub.

 

[blue68f100]

A Switch is a smart hub. Meaning it keep tracks of who is on what port. So if you need to send data from lan 1 to lan 4 it will do it directly without going up the chain to the router. There for making it a faster solution, if you are needing a lot of connections.

A hub is a dumb switch. All it does is pass connection packest to the higher one.

A router is a Switch with router capabilities.

 

[parlee]

could this be why when my friend has a 5 man lan playing css with nothing open but the game we get huge ping spikes when all 5 are playing at once? we tried different people on the 5th so we know that it was always when 5 were running... or is this more likely just a bandwith problem? he has 3 meg charter... pings are 25 with 4 people on and constant 300 with 5...

 

[prolfe]

Hi Parlee,
You seem like a great guy, but I have to ask this question: Why do you keep asking the same thing over and over? You have gotten several excellent responses, some of which have even told you which piece of hardware to buy. Yet you just write another post and say what you've already said. I suggest you run the speedtest mentioned earlier, and get make and model numbers on the hardware you have, and report back to us with some new information. I for one would be happy to continue troubleshooting this with you but we need some new information.

Hope this helps,
Phil R.

 

[mikeyp410]

The hub in general is going to multicast to every node that it is connected to. If you connect a switch (depending what type of switch) it will seperate the traffic to different LAN segments/Nodes. The Hub is too dumb to seperete these broadcast's.