A hub shares all traffic to all nodes whether they are interested or not. The maximum traffic that a hub can handle is when the SUM of all traffic reaches close to the hub speed (usually 10mbit). In reality, a hub starts to become inefficient when constant traffic on many ports rises to a SUM of just 3mbit! This inefficiency shows up as high "collision rates" being recorded by the attached devices.

A switch knows where traffic is bound for, thus a switch is able to handle its advertised speed (10mbit or 100mbit) on EACH port that it has.

With a correctly configured switch, and full duplex connections, ethernet interfaces should not show "collisions" when attached to a switch.

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by Grizwald54 edited by KeysCapt
last modified: 2005-10-09 13:17:11