[mleok]

I'm hoping someone has had to deal with this problem and can provide some advice...

My folks have recently switched back to Macs after leaving several years ago.

I have set up their system as follows:

2 iMacs
1 PowerBook
cable modem to Airport Extreme
USB printer connected to Airport Express across the room
another Express may soon wirelessly stream music to an existing hi-fi from an iPod

All of the computers connect wirelessly. They share the printer wirelessly. They share files wirelessly. It's all good here. Small bunnies and other woodland creatures traipse merrily throughout the room.

The problem is, for business purposes, they have two VOIP providers and no actual land-line in the house. Each provider uses a different VOIP device. Because the Extreme has only one LAN port, I can only have one VOIP device hooked up at a time. I tried hooking one up in front of the Extreme, with no luck. Hooking one up behind the other (both behind the Extreme) yielded no results.

Is it possible to place something BEHIND the Extreme which could service both VOIP devices? In other words, is there a relatively cheap device which could plug into the Extreme's sole LAN port and then give access to both VOIP devices?

Everything is working so well right now that I hesitate to mess with things (I won't go into the saga of getting things up and running thus far, other than to state that it wasn't Apple's fault). The two VOIP provider situation may prove untenable, but it's gotta be dealt with for now.

FWIW, I am in the USA. Any tips or even theoreticals would be greatly appreciated. THANKS.

[ghporter]

I think the device you're looking for is an ethernet switch. These are fairly smart (and inexpensive) devices that simply send the traffic to the appropriate port without too much fuss. They are NOT "hubs," which are dumb devices that just spread that traffic to all ports (and thus slow everything down when there's substantial traffic).

You could also buy a plain-jane wired router. They typically come with 4 wired ports; you could easily plug the Extreme into one, and each VOIP device into its own port, with the router's WAN port plugged into your broadband modem. While this wouldn't be a great thing for adding more wired computers, the VOIP devices don't need to be on the same subnet as the Extreme's clients, so that shouldn't be a problem at all.

My first urge however, would be to go with a switch downstream (on the LAN side) from the Extreme. Cheaper, simpler, easier to implement.