The world of networking revolves around hubs, switches and routers, these are what make up a vast majority of our home and business networks today (perhaps not so much hubs anymore though!) It is therefore important to understand the difference between them and what their main purpose is. Let’s start off with hubs.

Note: In this article I will be referring to layer one, two and three devices. Without going into too much detail about the OSI layer model for networking; Layer one refers to physical communication. Layer two refers to hardware based address (using Mac addresses) and layer 3 refers to logical network addressing, using IP addresses.

Hubs – Hubs, also known as repeaters are layer 1 devices that essentially replicate all network traffic to each active port. That means that if a device on a hub sends information to another device on the network, all devices on that hub have to listen to that information and see if it is meant for them. Hubs do nothing in terms of analyzing data or making decisions, because of this they are simply layer 1 devices. You can probably already see that they are very inefficient, if you have an 8 port hub with 8 devices on then every single packet is read by each of the devices. Because of this kind of technology, hubs are also prone to collisions, whereby two devices try and communicate at the same time. In today’s networking world hubs are becoming less and less common and are being replaced by switches.

Switches – Switches are layer 2 devices, unlike hubs they do not replicate traffic to each active port, instead they make decisions based on layer 2 addressing (Mac addresses). A switch will keep a record of every single Mac address that communicates to and from it, and from which port it did so. By doing this it is able to keep track of where devices are located on the network. When a packet comes into a switch it will have its layer 2 destination analyzed, the switch will then check its Mac address table to see where that device belongs, if the device is unknown to the switch then the packet will be flooded out to all ports (apart from the one it came in on). As you can see, switches are far more efficient than hubs. Collisions do not occur on switches as each port has its own collision domain.

Routers – Routers are layer 3 devices; they analyze network traffic based on its layer 3 address, or IP address. Routers are used to link multiple networks together and they hold what is known as a routing table. This routing table contains information about different networks and where they are located. Routers are slower than switches in terms of moving traffic through a network, but this is simply because routers have to make decisions about where to send a packet, this can get quite complicated for a router when there are multiple routes to different networks, when this happens a router has to calculate cost based on bandwidth, or how far away the link is for example. Routers are essential for creating a large network that consists of multiple smaller networks.

So there you have the fundamental differences between hubs, switches and routers. Remember that hubs are becoming a lot less common due to their inefficiency, not only that but switches generally cost the same and are therefore becoming a more popular choice for small to large networks.

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