Wireless Router with more than 4 ports VS Switch with 6 ports or more

[ignatiusonfire]

Which would be a better solution?

A Wireless Router with more than 4 ports or A Switch with 6 ports or more.

I have 6 Lan cables build into the walls of the house that I want to connect but the Standard Wireless Router provided by the Services Provided only has 4 ports. So I wondering which devices would be a better solution.

 

[Solandri]

The routers with more than 4 ports tend to be expensive commercial models. It's much easier just to get a switch and plug it into the router. In fact, if your router only has Fast Ethernet ports (100 Mbps), you can buy a Gigabit switch, plug it into the router, and plug all your devices into the switch to get Gigabit speeds.

 

[bill001g]

Good lucky finding a router with more than 4 ports. It will be simpler to just buy a switch and connect all the devices in the house to it and then connect the switch to the router. When you look at what is inside a router there is a 5 port switch. 4 ports you can see and 1 port that connects to the router chip to go to the internet. It would cost very little for the router manufactures to say put a 8 port switch in the router but there is little demand and running external switches really has no performance penalty since the bottleneck would be the 1 connection to the router chip. Then again you would need a 1g internet connection to even worry about that