Okay, now that my whole house is wired for cat5e in all rooms, I need some help trying to figure out what equipment I would need.

All rooms have at least 1 cat5e outlet. All the cat5e cables run to a central location, to a punch block in my master bedroom closet.

In my den, I have high speed internet through coax, which runs to a cable modem. I take the output of the cable modem into a 4 port router. Out of the router, I have two fo the ports each wired to a different computer. A third port of the router runs into the cat5e outlet which terminates into the master bedroom closet.

Now, in the closet, what should I hook that den connection to, a switch or a router? This switch or router will have it's ports connected to all the other rooms of the house so that the cat5e outlet in each room will be accessible to high speed internet as well as communication to each other. I plan on setting up a media center extender in the future (or use the xbox to do that).

Is a switch or a router more preferable? Or does it matter? The cable internet is already hooked to a router and I need to cascade another chain to port out to the other rooms.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

Switch should work fine.

 

Try reposting this in Ramblings or teh Home and Gardens forum (yes, we really do have one of those)... The nerds over there should be able to help...