With the huge growth of high speed Internet access and home networking, there will be a natural growth of interest in getting all the computers in your home connected to the Internet without having multiple Internet providers and MINIMUM hassle. So I recommend the Linksys EtherFast Cable / DSL Router.

At first, I was a little skeptical at how easy the setup would be. I must admit the setup was amazing--basically, NOTHING! Even if I weren't fairly comfortable with computers, I would be able to get this thing setup and running in a few minutes...no bull!

Previous to getting this router, I had two additional IPs provided to me by my cable service provider. Basically, it allowed me to connect my cable modem to my hub and connect my computers to my hub...enabling all the computers connected to the hub to use the Internet without the need for the cable router...the problem? You have to pay an additional fee for each additional IP...gets kind of expensive after a while. So I installed this router and cancelled the two additional IPs.

I connected the cable modem to the router, via a port clearly labeled WAN (Wide area network). I proceeded to remove my old hub and basically moved everything right on to the router. Before I go on any further, let me clear up my use of the term "router". The Linksys router is actually a hub, switch, and router, but I will just call it a "router" to distinguish it from my old hub.

Anyhow, connected everything up, reset my computers and bam! Internet access from every computer, without even having to change any settings on the computers! Pretty awesome, I say!

On top of the ease of use, though, the Linksys router provides some pretty advance feature, for example, I have an ftp server and web server running on a specific computer...all you have to do is go to the setup feature of the router, simply by typing the IP of the router in any web browser in your LAN, and direct the port requests to which ever computer is running the servers. I don't want to go into too much of specifics, but if you have any questions, feel free to ask me.

There are other features, but I would suggest visiting Linksys' website for the details. If you have a cable or DSL modem and want to share the access to other computers without any additional fees get this router! Besides that, you'll be on your way to setting up a home network WAY faster than other hubs out there, because you've also got a 100MB SWITCH all for less than about $160.00! Not bad. Consider this, my old unswitched 100MB hub, took about 10 seconds to transfer a 5MB file from one computer to another...with this router, less than 2 seconds!!!!

The only negative with this router is that it only has 4 ports, BUT this problem is easily resolved by simply connecting another hub to the "uplink/port 1" port. This router can supply up to 253 IPs, so basically, you could share ONE cable/DSL modem with up to 253 computers!

How it works: You have one assigned IP from your cable/DSL access provider. The router then creates a "virtual network". Within this network, you can have up to 255 IPs distributed to computers, with the first one reserved for the router and the last not usable (I think). Thus 253 computers...Anyhow, the router acts as a DHCP server (another feature of the Linksys router) and automatically assigns each computer on your network a virtual IP. The router then "remembers" where requests are coming from and sends the data out through the 1 IP that is actually assigned by your provider. When the data comes back, the router knows which computer to send the data back to...that's why it's called a router. That's a brief, non-technical run down on how 1 IP can be shared...this kind of thing can actually be done without a router, by running a proxy server on one computer, but that's a lot more time consuming and basically requires that computer to be on all the time...I don't really want to get into that here...

Overall, I like it a lot and would recommend it to anyone who has cable/DSL service. It's the best way to share Internet access...without having to setup software or a complicated proxy server based network...have fun!



Recommended: Yes