A Customer left a voice message asking for advice on his home network. I am not an IT professional, my company did not set up this customers LAN and am in no way obligated to provide an answer or any services to make this work, I just figured coming up with a solution would be a good way to reinforce the relationship a little bit with this guy. Customers home network: out of DSL (Ethernet not USB) in to a 15 out hub to 15 RJ45 leviton wall jack locations around the house. Customer can plug his laptop in at any location and access the internet as all 15 jacks are active (dsl). I cant remember what make or model the hub is just that it has 15 Female RJ45 outputs that go to 15 locations around the home. My company provided the cabling and had nothing to do with LAN configuration. Customer called up and informed me he would be having cable internet access installed next week. He wanted to know what he needs to have the cable guys do, Easy right? just plug the cable modem into the hub and remove the DSL modem. Then he tells me he will be keeping the dsl and wants to be able to access either(cable or dsl) connection from any location with any of his laptop computers. I have no idea how he would be able to have both connections working so that he could easily switch between the two from his laptop. By easily i mean double clicking a connection icon on his desktop. Any other solution with this customer would quickly become a never ending service call filled with questions i dont have the answers to. I will need to tell him that I cant help him with this issue and explain to him that he will need to contact his computer guy or i will need to be able to explain exactly what he needs to do to get it to work, The cable installers will not be able to answer these questions and even if they were able to answer them they wont because thay are not obligated to offer support for multiple machines. I really have no idea about any of this but i assume the switching between dsl and cable could be done with hardware of some sort. I know it can be done manually by removing one cable and inserting the other and i would think some company has created a piece of hardware along with software to make this simple. Again i really dont know. The big question here is would it be possible to have both connections plugged into a single hub or multiple hubs tied together somehow and then be able to switch between the two connections in software via desktop icon Example connection1 and connection2 or something to that effect. I doubt his current hub supports this(unless a product exists that would allow you to use a typical hub with an additional device to accomplish this task) if its even possible so any suggestions on a product/solution would be apreciated. Thanks

Also, the network has Win98SE laptops and a couple of WinME desktops. The network currently works perfectly just as it should. Im offering this information incase a solution for this issue exists under one operating system -vs- the other. At this point upgrading to Win2000 or something else isnt an option. I dont want to get myself too involved with this (ie. my advice causes problems that i become responsible for) but i would really like to help him out. I might be able to convince him to upgrade the 98SE notebooks to ME but thats it. Basically if this issue cant be solved with the addition of a few pieces of hardware and creating desktop icons for the two connections i will inform him he needs to call his IT guy. Thanks again. If anyone has a link to a networking message board please post.

I have a link to a networking message board. Computing.net Jeff_#

Late i know.:) thanks jeff