So, the router is in the study and three devices are attached to it? Plus one cable that now goes to another part of the house? And you want to add a hub in the middle? Should work ok, but might only offer limited network access. As someone already explained, a hub basically is a multi-port repeater. What goes in on one port comes out on all other ports. This also means that a hub will only run with the lowest common denominator of all devices in the network. If there is an IP-TV box, that MIGHT mean 10 Mbit / Half Duplex. A switch, however, is a multiport bridge, meaning that it at least does basic OSI/ISO layer 2 routing and mixing. It will remember the port a device is attached to and send all packets addressed to a device to its specific port. A switch also has a backplane that offers seperate throughput for all ports, meaning that port 1 can talk to port 3 with gigabit connectivity, while ports 2 and 4 get data at 100 MBit/s delivered from a gigabit link on port 5... etc. If you think that several of the devices attached on the breakout switch might be used at once, it might be no bad idea to set them to a bitrate one level slower that the uplink to your router (e.g. router<->switch: Gbit, switch<->devices: 100Mbit). Oh, and you usually will only have six additional ports available. You will probably need one port to act as an uplink to your router.
Cheers, Sebastian -- "If it was two men, the non-driver would have challenged the driver to simply crash through the gates. The macho image thing, you know." - Marc Clifton
