Understanding Hubs, Switches and Routers.
By: Jason Holland [http://www.Rawsoftware.com]
This article is not intended to teach you to be a networking expert. The intention of this article is to give someone with little to no experience with Hubs, Switches, and Routers a slightly better understanding of how those particular pieces of hardware work so that you might be able to improve your network. Maybe to prevent you from making a mistake when purchasing a piece of hardware.
Routers, Hubs, and Switches do pretty much the same thing at first look. Until you understand how they do it. To most people an automobile does pretty much the same thing as well. However how they do it is very different. I am sure most everyone can understand that. You wouldn't try to take a Volkswagon through the Rubicon (touted as one of the roughest 4X4 trails in the world), and you definitely wouldn't try to pick up your date for the Prom in a Military Humvee (well some one might).
So the next question is "How are you going to do it?". To really make that decision you need to make a few decisions about your network. You will also need to understand a few things about protocols and the network traffic they create. Also some protocols are more reliable than others. All protocols are "NOT" created equally. They appear to do the same thing, but they do NOT!
With 2 computers, and only 1 protocol installed (say TCP/IP) there will be generally no traffic on your network. Hence no degradation or network chatter. On the other hand lets say you have 10 computers, multiple protocols (TCP/IP, NetBEUI, IPX, AppleTalk, etc...) there will be constant broadcasts and discoveries being made on your network. This makes for a very busy network, with lots of unusable bandwidth. You might also be concerned about security for some reason. Lets say you have children, and you don't want them to be able to access the internet, but you want to be able to get to that computer all the time without having to go into their room and unplug their computer. The only way that can be done is with a router, and putting you computer in 1 subnet and their computer in another. Configuring the router to not allow pass through for their subnet.
