Routers

Historically, the main reason for purchasing hubs rather than switches was its price. This has largely been eliminated by reductions in the price of switches, but hubs can still be useful in special circumstances:

* A protocol analyzer connected to a switch does not always receive all the desired packets since the switch separates the ports into different segments. Connecting the protocol analyzer to a hub allows it to see all the traffic on the segment. (Expensive switches can be configured to allow one port to listen in on traffic on another port. This is called port mirroring. However, these cost much more than a hub.)
* Some computer clusters require each member computer to receive all of the traffic going to the cluster. A hub will do this naturally; using a switch requires implementing special tricks.
* When a switch is accessible for end users to make connections, for example, in a conference room, an inexperienced or careless user (or saboteur) can bring down the network by connecting two ports together, causing a loop. This can be prevented by using a hub, where a loop will break other users on the hub, but not the rest of the network. (It can also be prevented by buying switches that can detect and deal with loops, for example by implementing the Spanning Tree Protocol.)
* A cheap hub with a 10BASE2 port is probably the cheapest and easiest way to connect devices that only support 10BASE2 to a modern network (cheap switches don’t tend to come with 10BASE2 ports). The same goes for linking in an old thicknet network segment using an AUI port on a hub (individual devices that were intended for thicknet can be linked to modern Ethernet by using an AUI-10BASE-T transceiver).

In their early days, Fast Ethernet switches were relatively expensive . However, hubs suffered from the problem that as simple repeaters they could only support a single speed. Whilst normal PCs with expansion slots could be easily upgraded to Fast Ethernet with a new network card, computers with less common expansion mechanisms, or no expansion bus at all, and other equipment, such as printers, could be expensive or impossible to upgrade. Therefore, a compromise between a hub and a switch appeared known as a “dual speed hub”.

Such a device essentially consisted of two hubs (one of each speed) and a two port bridge between them. Devices were connected to the appropriate hub automatically based on their speed and the bridge handled inter-speed traffic. Since the bridge only had two ports and only one of those needed to be 100Mbps it could be much simpler and cheaper than a full fast ethernet switch. Such devices have been rendered obsolete by the decreasing cost of fast ethernet switches.

A hubbed Ethernet network behaves like a shared-medium, that is, only one device can successfully transmit at a time and each host remains responsible for collision detection and retransmission. With 10BASE-T and 100BASE-T links (which generally account for most or all of the ports on a hub) there are separate pairs for transmit and receive but they are used in half duplex mode in which they still effectively behave like shared medium links (See 10BASE-T for the pins specifications)

A network hub or repeater, is a fairly unsophisticated broadcast device. Hubs do not manage any of the traffic that comes through them, and any packet entering any port is broadcast out on every other port (other than the port of entry). Since every packet is being sent out through every other port, packet collisions result–which greatly impedes the smooth flow of traffic.

The need for hosts to be able to detect collisions limits the number of hubs and the total size of the network. For 10 Mbit/s networks, up to 5 segments (4 hubs) are allowed between any two end stations. For 100 Mbit/s networks, the limit is reduced to 3 segments (2 hubs) between any two end stations, and even that is only allowed if the hubs are of the low delay variety. Some hubs have special (and generally manufacturer specific) stack ports allowing them to be combined in a way that allows more hubs than simple chaining through Ethernet cables, but even so a large Fast Ethernet network is likely to require switches to avoid the chaining limits of hubs.

Most hubs detect typical problems, such as excessive collisions on individual ports, and partition the port, disconnecting it from the shared medium. Thus, hub-based Ethernet is generally more robust than coaxial cable-based Ethernet, where a misbehaving device can disable the entire segment. Even if not partitioned automatically, a hub makes troubleshooting easier because status lights can indicate the possible problem source or, as a last resort, devices can be disconnected from a hub one at a time much more easily than a coaxial cable. They also remove the need to troubleshoot faults on a huge cable with multiple taps.

A network hub or concentrator is a device for connecting multiple twisted pair or fiber optic Ethernet devices together, making them act as a single network segment. Hubs work at the physical layer (layer 1) of the OSI model, and the term layer 1 switch is often used interchangeably with hub. The device is thus a form of multiport repeater. Network hubs are also responsible for forwarding a jam signal to all ports if it detects a collision.Hubs also often come with a BNC and/or AUI connector to allow connection to legacy 10BASE2 or 10BASE5 network segments. The availability of low-priced network switches has largely rendered hubs obsolete but they are still seen in older installations and more specialized applications.

Linksys WRT54G (and variants WRT54GS, WRT54GL, and WRTSL54GS) is a Wi-Fi capable residential gateway from Linksys. The device is capable of sharing Internet connections amongst several computers via 802.3 Ethernet and 802.11b/g wireless data links.The WRT54G is notable for being the first consumer-level network device that had its firmware source code released to satisfy the obligations of the GNU GPL. This allows programmers to modify the firmware to change or add functionality to the device. Several third-party firmware projects provide the public with enhanced firmware for the WRT54G.

A wireless bridge is a hardware component used to connect two or more network segments which are physically separated. Consumers have been presented with wireless bridges operating in different frequencies and licensing models. One of the most prominent is the license free use of the frequency 2.4GHz reflected in the 802.11 standard.Other important frequencies used for wireless bridging are the frequencies around 5.8GHz and mm-Wave 60GHz. Both frequency bands can be used in most of the countries license free.Wireless bridges usually work only in pairs or more, and can be used in two types of implementations. They are the point-to-point link, or the point to multipoint link.In point to point link, there are a pair of bridges which are used to connect two network segments, typically in two separate buildings. In a point to multipoint scenario, one bridge is installed as the “root bridge”, and multiple non-root bridges connect to this root bridge. With this arrangement, if one non-root network segment wants to pass data to the other non-root segment, it passes it through the root bridge.During bridge setup, all the bridges must be set to the same service set identifier (SSID) and radio channel.

To translate between two segments types, a bridge reads a frame’s destination MAC address and decides to either forward or filter. If the bridge determines that the destination node is on another segment on the network, it forwards it (retransmits)the packet to that segment. If the destination address belongs to the same segment as the source address, the bridge filters (discards) the frame. As nodes transmit data through the bridge, the bridge establishes a filtering database (also known as a forwarding table) of known MAC addresses and their locations on the network. The bridge uses its filtering database to determine whether a packet should be forwarded or filtered.

Bridging and Routing are both ways of performing data control, but work through different methods. Bridging takes place at OSI Model Layer 2 (Data-Link Layer) while Routing takes place at the OSI Model Layer 3 (Network Layer). This difference means that a bridge directs frames according to hardware assigned MAC addresses while a router makes its decisions according to arbitrarily assigned IP Addresses. As a result of this, bridges are not concerned with and are unable to distinguish networks while routers can.

When designing a network, you can choose to put multiple segments into one bridged network or to divide it into different networks interconnected by routers. If a host is physically moved from one network area to another in a routed network, it has to get a new IP address; if this system is moved within a bridged network, it doesn’t have to reconfigure anything.

* Does not limit the scope of broadcasts
* Does not scale to extremely large networks
* Buffering introduces store and forward delays - on average traffic destined for bridge will be related to the number of stations on the rest of the LAN
* Bridging of different MAC protocols introduces errors
* Because bridges do more than repeaters by viewing MAC addresses, the extra processing makes them slower than repeaters
* Bridges are more expensive than repeaters

* Self configuring
* Primitive bridges are often inexpensive
* Reduce size of collision domain by microsegmentation in non switched networks
* Transparent to protocols above the MAC layer
* Allows the introduction of management - performance information and access control
* LANs interconnected are separate and physical constraints such as number of stations, repeaters and segment length don’t apply