Daniel Leung wrote:

> Then the idea of thinking taking the combo(splitter, cable modem)on the
> road come into mind. The benefit can be high speed access when there
> is TV cable, subletting of hardware to share cost, etc. Why don't they
> make potable cable modem in the first place? So I ask the guy what
> happen when we move the modem to my office, he say there is a chip in
> the modem that will only allow the modem  talk to a specific router on the
> network. This beats me because my network knowledge is very limited.

The cable modem is probably hooked up to a network using TCP/IP.  I can give you a
brief idea of how the TCP/IP works in relation to routing.  My  company has a WAN
(wide area network).  Each building that has a TCP/IP connection to the WAN has an
IP address for the router and an IP address for each machine with access to the
WAN.  The router for example would be 192.10.10.1 where the 1 is the IP address for
the router on the LAN (local area network).  All machines attached to the network
have an IP address.  Our addresses corresponds to the type of machine on the
network, 1 - 5 for routers, 6 - 16 for servers, 17 - 40 for printers, and 41 - 254
for users.  Now each of the users on the network use the router address as their
gateway to the rest of the WAN.  If you move a user with an IP address of
192.10.10.254 to a network with a router with an IP address of 192.43.10.1 it will
not be able to view the rest of the WAN until it has an IP address on that router's
LAN and uses the router as its gateway.  (Not the total picture, but a brief idea)

> In the mean time, the question is, in a Cable network, how many outlet can a
> router look after?

I don't know the actual maximum number of stations on a router but my company uses
four port routers with 254 IP addresses for each port along with the possibility of
having a server act as a gateway for an additional 254 IP addresses for each
server.  That would end up being 508 users per port for a total of 2032 users per
router.  I'm sure there is a way to get more users on a router.  The problem comes
with the more users you have on the router the slower the data can be accessed.

Just a brief glimpse of how the whole thing works,

Robert
--
Look, Listen, Learn
Information is being provided for educational purposes only


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