@Rosemary A home router typically accepts a connection from a WAN (Wide Area Network, typically a cable or DSL modem) and provides NAT (Network Address Translation) so more than one device can share a single IP address. Most home router today are also wifi access points. Any router that has more than one LAN (Local Area Network, home Ethernet) port also has a switch built-in, usually without saying.

contd

@Rosemary An Ethernet switch just allows multiple devices to connect to each other, mostly useful if your router was in one room, but you could only run one cable to another room with multiple wired devices. If you're only using wifi, you don't need a switch.

A wifi access point plugs into a router that doesn't have its own wifi (or its wifi is broken, etc) and acts as a wifi-to-wired bridge.

A wifi repeater connects to a wifi signal farther away and repeats it for greater range.

@Mycroft What we have is a single ethernet port to our apartment that goes back to a router somewhere else in the apartment complex. The switch should be sufficient for our needs. As I understand it, it just rebroadcasts everything to all of its ports?

@Rosemary If you do not control that router, or do not fully trust everything else plugged into that router (presumably other tenants' devices) I would recommend your own home router you control. That way you can control your own wifi access point too.

If you only use wired devices, and you trust the apartment's router, then just a switch would work fine. Assuming it provides internal IP addresses (typically with 192.168.x.x)

@Mycroft I don't know if we're allowed to use our own router on the network here; we'll have to ask.

@Mycroft We would also have to get someone to explain to us how to set up a router, because we've never done it before. Is it complicated?

@Rosemary @Mycroft Not hard no! Most routers now ask you straight away if you wanna set it up to just be a fancy secure switch, you only need to know its IP for config

@Nomaxice @Mycroft Are either of you able to recommend a good cheap router? I went into this expecting to spend maybe $15 or $20, but everything we can find is way more expensive than that.

@Nomaxice @Rosemary I'm afraid it's been a long time since I went shopping for one. I have a Ubiquiti EdgeRouterX myself, which is about us$50, but has no wifi and isn't the easiest to configure.

Most of the difference in router pricing has to do with wifi; if you don't stream 30 4k videos half a mile away there's absolutely no need for the expensive ones.

@Mycroft @Nomaxice We have no need for wifi, but we want something plug-and-play if that's at all possible.

@Rosemary @Mycroft I can find some cheap tp link and d link routers, not the fastest things ever, but all around the 20$ price range, on newegg
Usually they're pretty much plug and play, understanding they're on a network and simply redirecting the data under its own network

@Nomaxice @Mycroft I think we want gigabit speed at least, though. We get something like 100 MB/s on speedtest, and we'd like to keep that.

@Rosemary @Mycroft routers with Gbps are straight up gonna be more expensive, lemme check what managed switches would cost for that sweet Gbps...

@Nomaxice @Mycroft We found switches in the $15 range, but I think Mycroft said we should definitely have a router between us and the network?