Quote:
Originally posted by GreasyP
Our house's router is fizzing out, and we need to get a new one. But me and my roommate are in disagreement here. He swears that when he used to run an internet cafe all eight computers were hooked up to a plain ol' hub sharing a DSL line and everything was hunky dory. But everything I know about networking (which isn't a ton, granted,) leads me to believe that you CANNOT share an internet connection like that. You need a router so that it can pick up the WAN connection and share it between the LAN computers, since you're only allowed one IP address on the WAN side by the ISP. How can a hub without routing capability share a cable internet connection? Wouldn't it by definition be a router then? 
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What you are thinking is correct. The only way it would have worked, which I myself have done, is is the DSL company gave him unlimited IP addresses. I have set up a network like that, because the DSL company allowed multiple IPs from the same modem. In that case a hub would work just fine. The only advantage of that is price, otherwise it is not a good idea. With a router you get more security and less packet collisions. Not sure what his situation was, but I bet it was that the company allowed multiple IPs for him.