Routers/switches/and mbs Questions

[Kevin Authenthic]

Ok So I am currently enrolled in college and I am a Computer networking major I am highly motivated about my major and love it but there are parts that confuse me such as these

Ok so i understand a router is the hardware that sends out the connection your recieve your node but a switch is connected to a router if you run out of ports right so do but industy and company use switches and router together or just a lot of switches that is where i am confused and 10baseT stands for 10mbs right and 100baseT for 100mbs but when do we use these terms? any help

 

[USAFRet]

A router converses between networks, a switch converses within a network.

As for the rest....that is what homework is for.

 

[Kevin Authenthic]

A router converses between networks, a switch converses within a network.

As for the rest....that is what homework is for.

that is true thanks very much i am getting the hang of this now i see that a switch is used within a network but it all so weird to me that it can work in a "MAN" network like how can computer wire travel that far or do they use signals radio signals and stuff because i never understood how you can be on the same network from so far away

 

[bill001g]

They likely use fiber to go those distances but you have to be very very careful assuming just because some device is called a switch it means it does one thing and a device called a router does something else. There is a huge amount of overlap in function. This is the key reason networking people usually refer to networks as layer 2 and layer 3 rather than say switch or router. Things called layer 3 switches are very common devices and are much faster than a true router because they omit any feature than must be done with a general purpose CPU...like NAT for example. What is even worse is almost every consumer device you find that is called a "router" actually isn't they are more correctly called "gateways" because in most cases they can't actually run true routing protocols.

WAN,MAN,LAN generally are used to describe the size of the area the network covers not the technology used to carry the data. You can implement global WAN with all switches if you choose...not the best idea but there are reasons to do it.

There really is no easy way to learn networking, there a lots and lots of details you end up learning

 

[Kevin Authenthic]

They likely use fiber to go those distances but you have to be very very careful assuming just because some device is called a switch it means it does one thing and a device called a router does something else. There is a huge amount of overlap in function. This is the key reason networking people usually refer to networks as layer 2 and layer 3 rather than say switch or router. Things called layer 3 switches are very common devices and are much faster than a true router because they omit any feature than must be done with a general purpose CPU...like NAT for example. What is even worse is almost every consumer device you find that is called a "router" actually isn't they are more correctly called "gateways" because in most cases they can't actually run true routing protocols.

WAN,MAN,LAN generally are used to describe the size of the area the network covers not the technology used to carry the data. You can implement global WAN with all switches if you choose...not the best idea but there are reasons to do it.

There really is no easy way to learn networking, there a lots and lots of details you end up learning

Your right becasue usually the people that teach is are highly smart and do not know how to teach but is ok i am talking baby steps and learning off videos before i start getting into the fundementals of reading about it because it is hard to just go into it without actually knowing what each protocol does each device each osi layer and a whole bunch of stuff you must know what they do before you getting networking but are you good at this because perhaps you can take a look at my homework post i have given a answer to it but do not know if its a good solution

 

[bill001g]

Not sure your question I though it was about what the difference between a router and a switch was which I thought I explained. If it is about 10baset and stuff those are just name of the ieee standards used for data transmission. It gives you a big headache to try to read those documents and is why people just use the name. If you want the details go hunt down the documents that describe 802.3 and all the variants.

 

[Kewlx25]

In general, swtiches/hubs are their in a single broadcast domain. The way network devices find each-other is via broadcasting data and getting responses from everyone. This works fine when you have maybe 100 devices. But with every extra device, more and more data is being broadcasted during discovery.

This does not scale. So you break up the network into many domains. But now how do those devise find each other? Well, route the data. When a packet is destined for another domain, then route the data.

The next quest is how do you know which domain is where. Assign subnets. When you send data to an IP address that is in your current subnet, just drop it in the broadcast domain. If the packet is destined somewhere else, send it to your local router and let that device figure out where to send it.

 

[Kewlx25]

10baseT stands for 10mbs right and 100baseT for 100mbs but when do we use these terms? any help

100baseT: 100mb Ethernet over Twisted pair cable
100baseFX: 100mb Ethernet over 2-strand fiber
100baseSX: 100mb Ethernet over 2-strand multi-mode fiber
100baseBX: 100mb Ethernet over single-strand single-mode fiber
100baseLX10: 100mb Ethernet over 2-strand single-mode fiber, up to 10km
etc etc etc