"It was never the intention to propose superscopes as a solution to all subnetting needs - far from it. As is made clear in the article, it's a proposed solution for a small company on a tight budget - i.e., no new routers, DHCP servers, etc. It's presented as a quick, easy and cost-effective solution. Complicated (as someone suggested)? No - extremely simple."

My budget would have to be "$0" to do this. I know, because I did it for a bit of time, and it was a complete mess, because I could not get sign off to have another network port installed near my equipment. The $100 for the network drop and the 2 hours of my time in the evening watching the cable guy do it was well worth eliminating the headaches of carrying 2 logical networks on 1 physical wire without VLAN protocols.

"VLAN's? Again - this is a small company on a budget, remember? You'll need managed switches - expensive items."

For under $500 you can buy a managed switch with 24 GigE ports. That is a pretty nice price! And a company that needs less than 24 ports, what are they using? $50 8 port unmanaged switches? If so, they can go buy another $50 switch, and make a VLAN like that! "VLAN" just means "doing with one physical network what you would normally do with two physical networks." If a dinky managed switch is too rich for your blood, then just do it with multitple physical switches. And no to sound crazy, but any network infrastructure large enough to justify any of this is probably going to have managed switches anyways.

J.Ja