A small business owner is in the process of setting up a SOHO office. The office has only one connection to the Internet via a broadband cable connection. The office has four subnets that must be…

A firewall controls traffic based on security policies but does not inherently perform inter-subnet routing or NAT to share a single Internet connection across multiple subnets.

A router operates at Layer 3 and can route traffic between multiple subnets as well as forward traffic to an upstream Internet connection. In a SOHO setup, the router typically performs NAT to share the single broadband IP across all internal subnets, making it the only device listed capable of fulfilling both requirements.

A hub is a Layer 1 device that only broadcasts signals to all ports within a single collision domain and has no routing or subnet awareness.

A Layer 2 switch forwards frames based on MAC addresses within the same subnet and cannot route traffic between different subnets or to the Internet.