Hooking up a printer?

I am new to wireless have a Motorola wireless cable modem that was easy to
install and works great. My question is can I hook any printer to the USB on
the router and will it work or do I need a adapter besides a Printer to USB
cable?

Michael Boyes wrote:
> I am new to wireless have a Motorola wireless cable modem that was easy
> to install and works great. My question is can I hook any printer to the
> USB on the router and will it work or do I need a adapter besides a
> Printer to USB cable?

You don't say which Motorola wireless cable modem you have, but the
answer is almost certainly that you can NOT just connect "any printer"
to the USB jack on the router.

The USB port on the Motorola cable modem/routers with which I'm familiar
acts as a network interface. In order to connect a printer to a network
interface (USB or Ethernet), the printer must have its own network
interface, either built-in (so-called "network-ready" printers) or a
separate device (wired or wireless "print server").

If you consider that when you are installing a USB printer to a
computer, you have to install the USB driver on the computer, you'll
realize that there is no way to install the printer's USB driver on your
cable modem.

You can connect your printer to a computer that in turn connects to your
cable modem/router and share the printer with other computers connected
to the cable modem/router. The drawback of this arrangement is that the
computer to which the printer is connected must be powered on in order
for the printer to be accessed by other networked computers.

Most of the usual wifi vendors sell print server devices. Depending on
the model, there may be a USB printer port, a parallel printer port, or
some combination of these. Some multi-function "printers" will not
perform all of their functions when used with print servers, so if you
have one of these devices, some specific research is indicated.

Depending on your printing needs and budget, you may want to buy a
printer that has built-in network capability. I've had very good
experience with an earlier version of the hp 6980
http://tinyurl.com/ykwscj which has both wired and wireless network
interfaces built-in.


--
Lem MS MVP -- Networking

To the moon and back with 64 Kbits of RAM and 512 Kbits of ROM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer