Home Office Network

What is HUB ?What is Switch ? What is Router ?

Hub and Switch (Ethernet Switch or LAN switch) are used to connect one commuter to other computers or to other network devices or to other networks. They have several ports to plug network cable to make connections.

A hub is usually least expensive, least intelligent. Any packet (A packet is the basic unit of data transfer in a networked environment. Packets are individual chunks of data, flowing in a single direction. Once they reach their destination, they cease to exist.) that comes in one port is sent out to all other ports. Broadcast all packets to all ports. That is: every computer connected to the hub “sees” everything that every other computer on the hub sees. For example, one packet for computer A, it will be send this packet to all the computers including computer A, computer A will accept and process this packet, but other computers will drop this packet which is not for them. So HUB is least efficient. (Because every computer can see all the traffic between all computers and network, some times it is useful to do network sniffing for trouble shouting , run a sniffing software or protocol analyzer on a computer on the network connected with a HUB, like Wireshark, sniffing software can capture all the traffic, and all the captured traffic can be analyzed for troubleshooting or for some other purposes)

A switch does essentially what a hub does but more with more efficient way. By paying attention to the traffic that comes across it, it can “learn” where particular addresses are. For example, if it sees traffic from machine A coming in on port 2, it now knows that machine A is connected to that port and that traffic to machine A needs to only be sent to that port and not any of the others. The net result of using a switch over a hub is that most of the network traffic only goes where it needs to rather than to every port. On busy networks this can make the network significantly faster.

A router allows connectivity to one or more computers and share a single internet connection (Broadband internet connection like Cable or DSL ), helping create a network. For home users, these are particularly useful for taking a single broadband internet connection, and spreading it to at least two or more computers. Standard routers require the internet connection from a standalone modem, but modem-routers are increasing in popularity, which can be plugged into any broadband-enabled phone line, reducing cable clutter, and only taking up one power socket.

Most popular home network router manufactures are Linksys.

Router, HUB and Switch FAQ