[SOLVED] Does a Wireless Access Point broadcast all frames?

[Rodion15]

I have this basic theoretical doubt about how a Wireless Access Point works.

Please correct me if I’m wrong:
An access point behaves like a hub, not like a switch. So all the frames unicast by any device to another, are broadcast by the access point to all devices in the subnet. This means that any device will receive all the frames, even those not unicast to it, and will only process the frames that have been unicast to it.

Is this correct?, otherwise I’d appreciate a clarification.

Thank you in advance.

 

[bill001g]

Yes that is mostly how it works. But it has nothing to do with subnet

All devices with wifi radio actually receive the signals from every packet sent by your router and in fact any other wifi device. This include your neighbors wifi equipment that is on the same or close by radio channels.
The devices match their mac address and discard any data that does not match. This never leaves the wifi radio chip, only very special wifi radio chips pass the data to the cpu chip in the router or pc if the mac addresses does not match. When everything used to run on non encrypted wifi this is how people used to sniff wifi traffic say at open internet at a cafe.

Wifi is half duplex just like a hub but unlike a hub the end device sometime can not actually hear each others transmissions to avoid collisions.

 

[Rodion15]

Yes that is mostly how it works. But it has nothing to do with subnet

Thanks, that's much more clear now. However: I wonder if the receiving device will filter frames to an agreed channel and frequency, or will it just filter on MAC address?