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I plan on connecting a router (disabling DHCP) to a free port on a switch because i've run out of ports and I need 3 or 4 more. I have an extra router and this seems to be an OK solution.

My concerns are that:

  1. I am wrong, and what i'm trying to do will not work as planned
  2. The internet connection will slow down as I am splitting it 3 more times

What does everyone think?

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So you are planning on using the LAN side (only) of the router as a switch cascaded off an (other) existing switch? – techie007 Aug 10 '11 at 15:18
Exactly. Nicely put. – Dan Aug 10 '11 at 15:20
Switches do not split the internet connection in the way you are imagining, they really have nothing to do with the internet connection in any way whatsoever. Anything you do with switches on the LAN side of a router may affect bandwidth throughput on the LAN, but not the WAN, but that is completely different than internet connection speed. Bandwidth throughput really shouldn't be a problem on a small home network (unless you will be moving gigs of files between the computers on these switches). – MaQleod Aug 10 '11 at 15:39
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2 Answers

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This will work just fine. Just be sure to disable DHCP on the router you're adding, as you said you would.

If you have a severely fast Internet connection, then it could bottleneck on the bridging ethernet link between the switches. Even still, I think you'd have to be doing some nutty stuff for that to factor in much.

Are the switches 100Mbit ones?

Anyway, go for it, that'll work for ya.

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Yeah, they are 100mbit. Also we have a 50up/50down line from comcast so we're already pretty fast. – Dan Aug 10 '11 at 15:29
Cool, well I think considering, you're pretty darn unlikely to ever notice the trivial differences. Yay using hardware you already had! – Doc Aug 10 '11 at 15:39
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I don't think the propagation delay will be noticeable, unless you're doing something that requires constant real-time handshaking and where the number of hops really count.

Web browsing and downloading should appear the same.

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