My ISP gives 3 IPs for every modem and I live in a college house with 5 others and want to work with only 1 modem. If we have a 6 port hub and a 4 port router(SMC 7004VBR Cable/DSL Router) is this possible? Do I run the modem to the hub and then one out from the hub to the router and then to 4 computers and the other 2 computers straight from the hub? Or does the router have to be first in line and if so how do I get all 6 internet access. I don't really care about file sharing between users as long as everyone has unimpeded internet access. Thanks.

All you need is one IP; assign that IP to the router; Set the router to use DHSCP on the LAN; plug in the hub (but a switch is much better)have all users set thier PC's to receive the DHCP settings from the Router and enjoy. In this setup the router would have to plug into the modem and all clients would feed off of the hub. I cant think of any reason why yo would want/need 3 IPs unless the ISP prevents you from adding aditonal PCs to a network. Even then, there are ways around that. Pointer

Your first configuration is correct, although a switch would be better than a hub. Two systems connected off of the hub/switch would have their own IP address and get good performance. The router would have to be configured for the third IP address and share it with the other four. More expensive but fair, would be two or three routers with static IP's connected to a switch/hub.

Three IP's are better than one. Each IP on an ISP's local loop only get one share of the total bandwidth of the cable. With three IP's you get more bandwidth going through you Modem. With the connections through a router, one user doing MP3 downloads will kill the performance of the other systems connected through the router. While the systems with their own IP will not be slowed down that much.

"Each IP on an ISP's local loop only get one share of the total bandwidth of the cable." You assume that for this ISP line bandwidth is capped by IP locally. Firstly, if the line is ADSL the cap is built-in (physically associated). If the line is cable, the cap probably wouldn't be applied just by IP because each modem is given 3 IP addresses (thus it is impractical to calculate caps based on logical relationships, as some users will use one IP, others two, and some three). This assumes static addressing. Therefore any bandwidth cap would most sensibly be done via one of two ways: 1) login procedure. Associate a user with their IP addresses, hence their bandwidth usage. This requires further dynamic calculation to group users by IP and then bandwidth share in realtime. 2) More simply via their modem (one modem = one account = one share of bandwidth). 3) Even more simply, via their line (only for DSL though). Why give out 3 IP's for each modem if you are going to cap based on each individual IP address? Only if the user is aggregating accounts through a single modem. That said, having multiple IP's is almost always unnecessary for end-users. The IP is logical, it has no real world, physical limitations. One IP address can theoretically handle limitless (TCP) connnections even on a finite loop (until the packet size reaches below a certain threshold at which there is no space for a full packet).