Networking Devices - SWITCH

Switches are the connectivity points of an Ethernet network. Devices connect to switches via twisted-pair cabling, one cable for each device. The difference between hubs and switches is in how the devices deal with the data that they receive.


Whereas a hub forwards the data it receives to all of the ports on the device, a switch forwards it only to the port that connects to the destination device. It does this by learning the MAC address of the devices attached to it, and then by matching the destination MAC address in the data it receives. Figure 1 shows how a switch works.