Can anyone recommend a replacement hub that died on me?

utternoob

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Jan 12, 2007
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The previous one was a 3Com OfficeConnect Dual Speed Hub 16, I think the model number was 3C16751. It was used to connect 10 PC to a T1 line. Thanks in advance. I would really appreciate it.
 

Madwand

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Mar 6, 2006
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AFAIK, you can still get this hub, and if not, probably find it on eBay or something.. that's if you decide to maintain the status quo with no changes.

Hubs are more or less dead in the field as switches have become very affordable. If you're connecting directly to the internet, you should probably look at a router as well -- as a firewall between the internet and your computers. 16-port routers would be rarer and expensive, so you'd be better off getting a smaller router linking that to a switch, and then connecting the computers to that switch. (Note that you lose one port connecting the router to the switch, but most routers have more than one port, so you also have the option of directly connecting additional devices to the router as a resort for additional expansion.)

There are tons of options for switches, at various levels of technical capability and pricing, it's impossible to give a clear best recommendation. I'd suggest looking ahead to gigabit as most new hardware will have this capability and it'll give a performance improvement for local data transfers. In that vein, the Dell 2716 is often a really good buy (it's cheap to start and goes on sale all the time) as an affordable web-managed GbE switch that generally does at least the basic tasks well.

The Netgear GS116 is a simpler unmanaged affordable 16-port GbE switch that's probably OK.

Other products will probably be just fine, but tend to be somewhat more expensive -- these are among the cheaper ones.

Note also that at 16 ports and higher, the products start incorporating fans for cooling, and these are sometimes too noisy for office/home deployments. The above two are fanless.