Is your network falling behind?

If you're like many small businesses with an eye on success, you've already adopted broadband services to get faster access to the Internet. With higher-speed wide-area network (WAN) connectivity, you have the opportunity to get better performance out of your business applications and reap the benefits of online connectivity with remote employees, customers and partners.

But if you still have a hub-based local-area network (LAN), you may find that it is having trouble keeping up. Here are six reasons why:

1. Hubs are single-minded.

Business networking first took hold in the mid-1980s as companies began installing Ethernet hubs to create basic networks to connect their computers, servers, printers, and so on.

Hubs, like switches, allow multiple nodes to share the same wired or wireless connection. But even the simplest switch is more sophisticated than a hub, because switches pass the information directly to the intended recipient. Hubs, on the other hand, forward the information to everyone, until the intended person is found on the network.

With a hub, your network is like an old-fashioned, single-lane country road, with data traffic often sluggish or backed up due to congestion or collisions. A switch takes exactly the same "road" or wire and makes it into a multi-lane freeway. Users communicate at much higher speeds and with far greater reliability.

2. Hubs can't prioritize.

All users connected to a single hub are on the same segment, which means they are competing for a fixed amount of bandwidth. Hubs cannot differentiate high-priority applications or users from lower-priority ones, so a mission-critical business application may get only a fraction of the bandwidth it needs if someone on the same segment is transferring a large file — even if the file is pictures from their summer vacation!

3. Hubs can't protect.

The lack of segmentation in a hub-based network also makes the network less secure because it's harder to protect data within a shared segment.

4. Hubs don't grow.

The limited, shared-bandwidth design of a hub restricts growth. As users and applications are added, network performance often drops dramatically. Because each node in a hub-based network has to wait for an opportunity to transmit in order to avoid collisions, response times and application performance can be significantly degraded when more users are added to the network, or as users transmit larger and larger files.

5. Hub failures are contagious.

Hub-based networks are notorious for failing because one faulty device can cause problems for other devices attached to the hub.

6. Hubs don't do Gigabit.

Just a few years ago, Fast Ethernet (100 mbps) was considered a top-speed LAN infrastructure. Today, a small business with large file-transmission requirements, like a graphic arts or engineering company, could easily find itself in need of Gigabit Ethernet (1000 mbps) to aggregate desktop and server traffic. If Gigabit Ethernet is in your future, hubs won't provide the migration path to get you there.