Why Hubs Belong to the Past
See how hubs flooded traffic and caused collisions on early networks.
Building a Local Network
To connect several devices into a LAN (Local Area Network), you need a central device that joins them. Early on, that device was the hub. Today it is the switch. Understanding why hubs were replaced reveals how local networks really work and why switches are so much better. This lesson focuses on the humble hub and the problems that made it obsolete.
What a Hub Does
A hub is a simple device with several ports that connects devices in a star shape. But a hub is not smart: when a frame (a unit of data on a LAN) arrives on one port, the hub simply repeats it out every other port. It does not look at addresses or decide where the data should go. Every connected device receives every transmission, whether it is the intended recipient or not.
All lessons in this course
- Why Hubs Belong to the Past
- How a Switch Forwards Frames
- MAC Addresses and the Address Table
- Collision and Broadcast Domains