Can someone explain me the difference between those three devices?
In: 1512
Hubs and switches are similar – both operate at the MAC layer (Layer 2); but hubs don’t apply any intelligence to the packet forwarding whereas switches only forward packets out a port to known MAC addresses out that particular port (as well as forwarding broadcasts and unknowns).
Routers operate at Layer 3 – segmenting traffic into separate networks (broadcast domains). Routers are also used to transition between different media types (e.g. LAN to WAN) and can do other types of packet manipulation (e.g. packet filtering, network address translation, etc.)
To make things even more confusing; many switches these days can do layer 3 functions.
Hope this helps!
Latest Answers