Switches

The Basics

Think of a network as the neighborhood in which you live. In this neighborhood, everyone has his or her own house. Each house in your neighborhood represents an individual computer.

Just as each house in the neighborhood has a street address, each computer has an “address” too. For each computer equipped with a network card, the “address” for this computer is the MAC (Media Access Control) address. MAC addresses are unique for each networking device (such as routers, switches, network interface cards…etc), and are distributed by IEEE. On a basic Ethernet network, computers identify each other by using the MAC address of their networking components.

Introducing a Switch

Referring back to the neighborhood example, a switch is like a mail carrier. The switch delivers information to and from the individual computers on the network. When a computer is connected to a port on a switch, the switch learns the MAC address of the computer and stores this information in a table of addresses.

Then, when data intended for that specific computer comes through the switch, the switch will automatically send the data directly to the port the destination computer is connected to.

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