I found one of these in PC World today for £39.99 :
http://www.belkin.com/networkusbhub/So I bought it to see what exactly it'd work with. The answer so far is everything - printer, scanner, webcam, USB dial-up fax modem and also my 3 mobile broadband adaptor (
http://www.qfonic.com/images/products/zte-mf622-blk/image01.jpg).
This is rather nifty as I can deploy the mobile broadband adaptor at the top of the house (5 bar signal) and have it failover to that if the ADSL goes down. It connects to a Win 2k3 server located in the garage which routes via the ZTE modem if the main routing via ADSL is down. The only "gotcha" is that Win2k3 doesn't seem to reset the metrics appropriately when you disconnect the modem, requiring a reboot (any ideas on that Chris - I've tried the obvious suspects?).
The Network USB Hub supports USB 2.0 devices, but it can't cope with the speeds. In practice you get about 25Mbps (suspiciously close to maximum 802.11g throughput
) which is pretty much OK for anything bar raw video.
Apart from a brain-dead setup (defaults to DHCP, which MUST work to gain access to set a static IP address
) this seems like a device which does what it claims, and a bit more.
Windows/Mac only I'm afraid
Edit - specs on that link are rubbish. Basically it's a 5-port USB 2.0 hub which connects via a network cable to your home network. You install software onto your PC to create "virtual USB ports" which are really the USB ports on the hub (wherever it is - for example it could be on the other side of the world!). As you connect devices to the hub, Windows detects them just as if they were connected to a normal USB hub situated next to your PC. It'll support 15 virtual connections, but that doesn't mean 15 devices - eg a multifunction printer/scanner will use 4 virtual connections to control it.
