There are many different types of cabling, but the most common is 10baseT which has a maximum distance of 100 meters.
If you want to extend your network beyond 100 meters you will have to put in some type of repeater because after 100 meters the signal because unreadable. Back in the day people would use repeaters, bridges, and hubs to extend the length of the network and to connect many devices to the network. Now switches are so commonly used it is rare to see any other type of layer 2 devices.
Hubs
- Don’t look at the frame or any of the data
- They repeat the signal out every port and thats it
- Hubs can result in collisions
- Hubs run at Half-Duplex
Switches
- Break up collision domains
- Don’t break up broadcast or multicast domains
- Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) – prevents loops
- Switches can run at Full-Duplex
How Switches Work
- Switches start with an empty table
- A computer plugged into the switch sends data to another computer that is also plugged into the same switch
- The switch receives this frame and puts the sunders MAC address in its table
- Because the rest of the table is empty it then broadcasts the destination address out every port
- When the destination port responds, the switch puts that MAC address in its table
- Now that the switch knows where the sunder and receiver are, it sets up a point-to-point connection
Related Topics:
ICND1 Study Guide – The Fastest Way To Get Cisco Certified Guaranteed!