SMC EZ Networking Kit

The exponential growth of small businesses and their increasing awareness of the value of networking hasn't gone unnoticed by all of the main players. Intel's assault on this huge market began with the acquisition of Dayna Communications at the end of 1997, resulting in the release of its InBusiness range. Recently, 3Com proudly announced that the demand for its OfficeConnect products had placed it at the top of the small-business networking market.

SMC, now part of the Accton empire, is also a major player, boasting a long association with networking products. Its EZ Networking Kit is a low-cost solution for small businesses looking to take a dip in the networking ocean, and aims to be simple to install and use. The kit provides enough hardware to get two PCs networked and comprises a four-port Ethernet hub, two PCI network adaptors and two generous 7.5m lengths of category 5 cable.

The hub doesn't require configuration so you just plug in the cables and it does the rest. It supports both Ethernet and Fast Ethernet so you can connect a mixture of PCs over 10Mbits/sec and 100Mbits/sec speeds, although for simple resource and printer sharing you're unlikely to see any benefits from the higher speed. A group of indicators show collisions and status for each port, although they don't reveal the connection speed. There are actually five ports on the hub since port four has a dual function. It can act as a crossover port for either PC connection or for cascading another hub using a straight-through cable, while an uplink port alongside supports links using a crossover cable. However, you can't use both at the same time. Cascading is where hubs are daisy-chained together to increase the number of available ports, although there are some Ethernet rules that limit this. You can't, for example, cascade more than two hubs together over Fast Ethernet, so you may have to consider buying a larger hub if you want more than six Fast Ethernet ports on your network.

The network adaptors are typically the kind of quality hardware we've come to expect from SMC over the years - and regularly recommend along with Intel and 3Com cards. Our experience has shown that cheap unbranded network cards can be a big problem since they frequently experience installation problems and resource conflicts and rarely come with support.

The SMC cards have three indicators on their backplate showing link speed and activity, all of which assist in troubleshooting. They support auto-negotiation and will therefore sense that the SMC hub supports Fast Ethernet and will configure themselves to connect at the higher speeds.

A poster-style manual shows clearly how to install the network cards and run the DOS configuration utility if required. Unfortunately, at this point SMC comes in for some real criticism as this is as far as it's prepared to go. There's no information about configuring the card under Windows and no help in choosing the correct network protocol, setting it up and, in the case of TCP/IP, choosing a suitable range of addresses. Installing the cards, loading the drivers and connecting the wires is the easy part. Getting the things to talk to each other can often be the biggest problem.

Pricewise, the EZ Networking Kit is on a par with similar dual-speed Ethernet kits from Intel and 3Com. It's a good starting point for entering the world of networking, but the supplied documentation does leave a lot to be desired.

Author: Dave Mitchell