Most of the problems with today’s small business and home networks are the “plug it into an empty port” design.

The major problem is that consumer class routers have been designed to network 2 to 4 computers together so they can share 1 Internet connection. To enable all of the computers to share a connection to the Internet and to be networked together, consumer router manufactures combined a router with a network switch. Basically, they took a router and added some extra Ethernet ports so that it would be very easy for consumers to use the “plug it into an empty port” network design and have everything work.

» Read more: Fixing the problem with a Router-On-A-Stick