They do? Which ISP? I couldn't find any consumer cable ISP service that offered multiple IP's on the left coast. I couldn't even find one that offered a static IP. What county? What planet?
Name withheld to confuse the answers? If you've ever read any of my answers, you'll note that withholding the hardware and OS desription is a capital crime.
I'll assume Windoze XP Home on both. Most users don't want to admit that they're using a Microsoft product and tend to
What does that mean? Whether you're using wireless or wires, it's still a LAN.
Why not?
That assumes I understand what they are trying to say. It would have been much easier if you simply disclose what you're trying to accomplish and what you have to work with. Answering that question is MUCH easier than decoding whatever the following means.
What a bunch of unintelligible gibberish. There's also some drivel that appear wrong. For example, there is no "robbing" of bandwidth by either a switch or a hub. The traffic is distributed equally between the two destinations depending upon packet size and internal FIFO buffering.
Wrong. A switch will work just fine. I have several DSL installation that use SBC's overpriced 5 static IP address service. I even scribbled a document on how to use it properly with the goofy routeing system that SBC uses to deliver the 5 IP's.
All wrong. Totally and completely wrong. Absolutely, miserably, horribly, wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong....etc.
Think of an ethernet switch as an ethernet bridge with more than 2 ports. For a simple bridge, they way it works is for the bridge to build a table of: MAC address port numbers Each ethernet port has a shopping list of destination MAC addresses that are seen on that port. If a MAC address moves from one port to another (by moving the connecting cable), the MAC to port table will instanly update to the new configuration.
Traffic that has a destination MAC address across the bridge will get passed across the bridge. Traffic, where the destination address is NOT across the bridge, will not go through the bridge. Broadcasts have no destination address, therefore they get passed across the bridge.
Now, we add more ports to the bridge and call it an ethernet switch. Everything is exactly the same except there are more ports. Traffic with a destination address of one specific port goes only to that port. Traffic with no destination address (i.e. broadcasts) go to all ports.
Since there's no router, your ISP will the MAC address of the destination computah in its ARP table. MAC address IP Address All the packets destined for a specific machine will go directly to that machine via the switched port.
At this point, I can get really techy about the different types of switches (crossbar and store-n-forward), per port buffering, 10/100 speed transitions, internal bus bandwidth, NWAY negotiation, flow control, and how it all affects performance distribution and latency. I'll keep it simple and only off that there's no obvious effect until you try to get wire speed performance. For what you're doing, it probably matters little if you're using a hub or a switch as long as the hub/switch speed is faster than your internet connection.
While I'm on the subject, there's one really nice thing about switches. A switch will do full duplex while a hub will not. There may not be much performance benifit for internet traffic, but it sure speeds things up for LAN traffic.
If you non-cleverly select a "dual speed 10/100 hub" instead of a switch, be prepared for some rather disgusting performance issues due to 10/100 speed transition, internal buffering, and no flow control, issues.
So, where did you dig up that gibberish? Never mind. I don't wanna know.