snow white and the seven dwarfs need internet

February 17, 2009 8:46 AM

Asking for a friend; need to connect 2 windows desktops, 3 windows laptops, 1 mac desktop, and 4 xbox360 to my home network, what do I need hardware-wise and what do I need to consider in regards to my ISP?

8 kids makes for a lot of hardware needing internet at the same time. are we looking at a 12ish port SMB router? can we stack 4 port router/switch linksys? the laptops need wireless, the rest can be hardlined. there is no existing infrastructure in the house. there are two 4 port hubs and a 4 port wireless router onsite already.

posted by phritosan to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

You can connect both hubs to the router using their uplink ports, and connect all the devices with little difficulty.

Your ISP isn't likely to care or notice. You may not have enough bandwidth to comfortably have everyone doing their thing at once, but so long as nobody's running peer to peer clients or the like it shouldn't be a major issue.
posted by Rendus at 9:09 AM on February 17, 2009

Standard Wifi router + x port switch(es)

Looks like you already have all the hardware you need, but I would definitely recommend ditching the hubs and buying switches. (hubs share total bandwidth)
posted by wongcorgi at 9:42 AM on February 17, 2009

Assuming all the laptops have Wifi, you can make do just fine. Hubs do share bandwidth, but you probably wont notice unless you do a lot of intranet traffic. It might make sense to put all the 360's on the same hub to isolate them a bit and maybe take advantage of local games broadcast if the software uses that.
posted by pwnguin at 2:43 PM on February 17, 2009