Julie <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Hi folks, > > Could someone tell me the difference between and hub and a switching hub? > My understanding is that a switching hub will allow a 100Mbps communication, > regardless if all stations can receive this speed. Alternatively a plain > (?) hub will restrict the network to the lowest speed which is connected to > it. You can think of it this way. A simple hub is like a party line. All ethernet traffic on all the computers connected to the hub see the same data, even if it is not destined for them. This is analogous to thin wire ethernet, where all connected systems have to listen to the same cable. This means that before transmitting, each system has to listen for other traffic, and wait until it is not busy. A switch acts like a cross point switch, being smart enough to recognize which packets are targeted to which computers connected to it. It does this by learning the ethernet address of each connected system, and decoding the ethernet address of the destination of each packet. It routes that packet ONLY to the computer it is destined to. This means that several systems can be communicating simultaneously. Not only does this greatly improve bandwidth (since it is like many pipes, instaed of one shared pipe), but it allows different speed interfaces to be mixed without affecting other ports. These days, switches aren't that much more expensive than hubs. I highly recommend using switches unless your budget is severly constrained. -- Russ Poffenberger Engineering Specialist Schlumberger Technologies ATE DOMAIN: [log in to unmask] 1601 Technology Drive San Jose, Ca. 95110 Voice: (408)437-5254 FAX: (408)437-5246 Visit our website regularly for FAQs, articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more http://nospin.com - http://nospin.org