hi, i work at a school, we have a network for academical and adminisrative purposes, there are about 70 computers interconnected, and a internet conection of 256 kbps. Te network needs to be optimized, all the networking is done by Switches and Hubs, and tends to be very slow at times, I suggested to aquire a ROUTER to manage the traffic, but is it really necessary? are there other oprions? im inclined to CISCO products, but dont know what model would be better, the school might expand to WI-Fi in the future, also a WEB server will be needed in the future, i dont know if its enough info for anyone to give their opinion, thanks.

A router won't increase your network speed. The first thing you will want to do is inventory all hubs, switches and the NIC's on clients. If any are 10 Mbps, you'll want to change those for 100 Mbps. With everything running at minimum 100 Mbps you should have enough bandwidth for a network this size. If you have managed switches that are VLAN tagging capable, you might want to take a look a segmenting your network using VLAN's. If not, you can segment with subnetting. Either of these solutions do require a router but you could easily install Linux/UNIX on a PC and use it as a router if you have some spare's kicking around and know Linux/UNIX. Segmenting will reduce traffic/collisions and improve overall network performance. If you do end up buying a router, just make sure it's capable of a minimum of 100 Mbps. A 100/1000 Mbps would be wiser as it would allow you to increase to 1000 Mbps at some time in the future. As to which router to buy, that's subjective. You say you're inclined towards Cisco. Do you know Cisco products and the Cisco IOS? If not, don't buy one. Even if you do, realize this, Cisco is not cheap. If you ever want/need support from them, you'll pay through the nose for the support contract. Also, should you decide you want Cisco training, you'll pay through the nose for that too.

Thanks a lot for your answer Curt, i will check all the nic's and hubs and switches, to see if they are running on 10 or 100 (mbps), i have worked with subnetting but not with VLANs, i will check into it, thanks a lot.

You will definately want to get rid of any 10 Mbps devices/NIC's in your network. If you're using a 10 Mbps switch or hub, everything plugged into it will only run at 10 regardless of what type of NIC they have. I wouldn't worry too much about VLAN tagging. If you know how to subnet, you can easily use that to segment portions of your network from each other in order to reduce bandwith usage.