Is an ethernet switch a good choice for a simple home network with a dial-up connection?
A switch may be a bit of overkill for a small network, particularly if it’s running 100Mb/s. It won’t cause any problem, but it’s not likely to offer any performance gain over a standard hub. Switches become beneficial on networks with a lot of nodes and traffic. Then, the avoidance of collisions from passing packets only to the node for which they are intended can greatly enhnace the efficiency of the network and the traffic it can handle. Actually, for only a few nodes, a switch may indeed cause a slight reduction in performance compared to a hub–probably not enough to be actually noticeable–because the packet analysis performed by the switch adds a couple microseconds of latency. So, unless you’re antiicipating a lot of growth in your network, I’d say stick with a good 100Mb hub.
