Router & Switch Connections?

[bcrady]

Hello, I am in the process of wiring up my house with a hard line network. When I am all said and done Ill end up with 6 outlets throughout the house. I have a 4 port router of which I am using 2 ports right now. Vonage and PC.
I am not to familiar with switches but I think I understand that they will use 1 net connection and "Switch" that connection between connected devices, but you can't run both devices at the same time. Right?

So, if I use the 2 free ports on my router and plug them into the switch, will that allow 2 devices to be used at the same time? Because there are 2 active connections feeding into the switch?

My other option is to just buy an 8 port router and be done with it. LOL

By the way I do have a dual lan Motherboard. How might I use this? Crossover Cable?
Thanks

 

[Emerald]

just buy an 8 port switch and connect it to your router. This will leave you with one port on the router and 7 ports on the switch. They will both work at the same time.

 

[schm1tty]

Everything will work fine together. You can even plug in several switches in a daisy chain and have hundreds of users

And a crossover cable is to connect 2 like devices(router to router, computer to computer, switch to switch, etc.).

Some router's have a feature that allows you to plug in two cables to it so you can double your speed, but that would not be of use unless you are going to use the computer as a server or something with a high lan bandwidth demand.

Oh and think of it this way....that 8 port router you were looking at, that's just a router with an 8 port switch built onto it. Home routers are not really routers at all, they are a number of devices built into one(dhcp server, dns server, ip router, switch, firewall, nat, etc.). If you go look at enterprise level equipment you will see that a router is a device totally seperate from a switch and the routers will have only one wan and one lan port.

Hope this helps