There are several types of switches. Another term for a switch is "smart
hub". A lower cost switch will learn and remember the MAC address that is on
each of its ports. (MAC address is encoded into each Network Interface Card
and is unique).

There are also "layer 3 switches" that can learn and route signals based on
IP (Network layer) addresses. If such a switch also has administrator
programming capabilities, then there is little difference between such a
switch and a router. A router, however, is optimized to do fast routing on a
limited number of ports, perhaps only 4, while a switch will often have 8,
16, or more ports. As you may expect, price of layer 3 switches is much
higher than for MAC layer switches.

Hope this explanation is clear enough.

Peter Shkabara
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-----Original Message-----
> Okay, so what's the difference between a switch and a router?

     From what I remember, a switch only looks at the Ethernet address (MAC)
software layer, a router looks one logical layer above that, at the TCP/IP
software layer. Aside from just routing packets, a router can reject invalid

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