Currently i’ve got a BT Infinity wireless router with the WIFI disabled and connected to an Apple Airport Extreme router positioned roughly in the centre of my house, and it has performed flawlessly for years. I’m expanding my network as i’m having an extension built and am adding a few cat6 cables while I can (one for my TV, one for my Home Cinema Amp and one for a desktop computer). I am looking at a D-Link 8 port netwrork switch and am assuming I can plug everything into that and it’ll just work? i.e. plug in my BT modem, Airport Extreme for WiFi and the three or so Cat 6 cables. Reviews of the swich seem to suggest this, but I know from experience that reviews can sometimes be misleading or inaccurate.

Thanks.

Should work, the only thing to watch for is that you might need a cross over cable to connect the new switch and the BT Router.
RM.

A gigabit switch shouldn’t need a crossover cable, auto-MDIX is part of the specification. A quick Google would suggest that the BT Home Hubs have some or all “GigE” ports depending on vintage.

I’m not entirely sure why you’re bothering with CAT6, unless it’s come down dramatically in price since I last looked.

Switch should autosense, as indeed should the BT router. Crossover cables are a thing of the past.

The BT router is the previous non-dual band vintage hence why i’m using the Apple router on 5GHz as I get too much interference on 2.4GHz and hence an unreliable wifi (though to be fair the wifi issues was on my previous modem router, I never tried the BT one on wifi). The cat 6 cable wasn’t too expensive – about 50p metre better to have it than not I thought. the D-Link 8 port switch is GigE and is about £20. Hopefully it’ll be plug and play as i’m not sure what Crossover cables are! Cheers.

Crossover is a thing of the past, I can’t even remember the last time I used one besides an ad hoc network! Basically an ethernet cable wired differently so two computers can talk to each other directly without an intermadiate point such as a hub or switch. Nowadays switches are all configured to autosense what kind of cable is plugged in so it’s of no concern to you.

Crossover is a thing of the past

for every modern auto sense switch installed, there are 10x as many non auto sensing still around…