What does a Networking Switch actually do?

Question

I've always wondered what does a networking switch actually do. I know it allows you to communicate between different computers in your house and allows you to take control of what goes in and out, but does it do anything else besides that? Are there any advantages it gives you vs using Ethernet through a router? I saw Netgear make a switch called the "Nighthawk Pro Gaming SX10 Switch" and its a gaming switch. What would it do compared to using a gaming router?

Answer 1

Switch attaches to a router. It extends network capabilities. If you run out of ethernet ports you can use a switch. In effect, turn one port on the router into four or five. How many ever the switch has. If your devices, computers, etc.. are quite a distance from the router, typically 100' or more, then you can run an ethernet cable to a switch. Even if you only got one device or one computer its still a good idea to use a switch in that scenario. Like if you buy a laptop you don't have to switch between using the desktop and laptop or go out an buy a switch as you already got one. A switch will also to help reduce latency and packet collision to some extent on long ethernet cable runs. In other words, a switch extends the router and/or adds ports for future use in another location and helps reduce latency and packet collisions.

Answer 2

routes packs of data

Answer 3

it wont do anything that a gaming router cant already do, although if you had 20 people all gaming together on the same network it could share things out more fairly probably because a home router wont be that sophisticated at such a simple level. so for an apartment block a switch might be a very good idea. a router can join up your network with other types of networks a switch can only deal with things that are all the same kind of network, thus a router is STILL REQUIRED before a switch is added to the system. A switch can divert and filter lots and lots of connections so it has a simple menu for doing that. so a switch is used for a large organisation and is not necessary for home use.

Answer 4

A home router (whether gaming router or not) is also a switch. Usually it includes upto 4 LAN ports, those LAN ports are connected through an embedded switch within the router. So when somebody is trying to sell you an external switch, they are doing it because those 4 included LAN ports are not enough for your purposes. Like for example, if you're hosting a LAN party at your house, and a whole bunch of people are connecting through Ethernet rather than WiFi, because it's a faster & lower latency method of connection, which is what's necessary for games. So by the time you and 3 of your buddies take up those initial router ports, there's no more room for other buddies to connect up, therefore you may want additional ports for them to connect up to too. It's similar to a power bar which lets you take a single wall socket and attach multiple devices to the same socket, except in this case it multiplies the number of networking connections available instead of the number of electrical connections.



What exactly is a switch? The easiest way to explain it is to explain what it replaces, the hub. The hub was an early way of networking, which was pretty much nothing more than a wire that other wires connected to. It did no intelligent management of the signals coming out of those wires. A switch is similar to the hub, except it has more intelligence inside. In a hub, with no management going on, all of those multiple wires sending signals independently to each other ended up clashing with each other and the more connections you put onto it, the more likely there was to be a clash. The switch has a simple microprocessor inside that intelligently distributes the signals between the different connectors. Each connector is isolated from each other by the internal microprocessor, which stores and forwards the data between the proper communicating ports. No chance of everybody talking at the same time and nobody hearing each other.

Answer 5

A network switch is simply a hub but with the added advantage of mapping out devices connected to it so accessing remote connections becomes much faster. With the basic hub, network connection requests travels in a hit and miss style, all the time.



Pure switches do not allow you to take control of what goes in and out. That is the job of a router, a device that connects two different networks together, like the wide area network (WAN) of your ISP (which eventually leads to the internet) and the local area network in your house (LAN).



Most routers nowadays are incorporated with switch functions. As for the Nighthawk Gaming Switch, it's new to me. A quick look at its specs reveal settings for gaming and streaming. Without digging any further into it, I'm just guessing they added preset modes wherein certain ports are given priority over others. Hubs and switches rotate port traffic continuously in equally allotted times. Advanced switches are able to determine inactive ports and take them off that rotation. More advanced switches like this gaming switch go further and give more time for a game console or a video streaming PC to use the network making network connection faster.



Without looking at what a gaming router is, I'm guessing it's a regular router slapped with a gaming switch. Routers can be tweaked already in the first place so it only takes some custom settings for the router to favor gaming connections.

Answer 6

An Ethernet hub (no longer very common) takes any packet it receives on any one of its ports and broadcasts those packets on all the remaining ports.



In contrast, a switch learns what device is connected to each port and it recognises incoming packets and sends them out only on the one specific port for the particular target device. Unlike a hub that can handle only one packet at a time, a switch can handle concurrent packets between different pairs of devices increasing the total throughput.



There are managed and unmanaged switches. An unmanaged switch is literally a plug and play device. It learns the MAC addresses of each connected device and uses these addresses to send packets only to specific ports/devices.



A managed switch can be configured with multiple virtual LANs (VLANs) on separate subnets. Unlike an unmanaged switch, these switches can be configured to work as multiple separate switches but all in the same box. This allows the ports to be allocated to different subnets as required.



A router has a routing function that allows packets on one subnet to be passed to a different subnet. Home routers typically have two subnets - the internal network and the ISP connection. Some routers have a third subnet, which provides a form of guest network. Normally a guest network and the main private network cannot communicate with each other.



On the private side of the routing function, there is a switch function that supports connections to Ethernet devices and WiFi devices, and in some cases, a USB device.



I hope this helps.

Answer 7

OSI model knowledge INCOMING:

There are layer 2 and layer 3 switches.

Layer 2 switch is described above by David E, however it does not "route". Layer 2 switches "switch" packets from a port to the destination port. This is a traditional non-managed switch.



Layer 3 switches do the same as Layer 2 switches with the added features of:

-Being managed (usually by a firewall)

-Assigning an IP address to individual ports, not just a virtual interface usually used for ease of access

-Holding both a MAC address table AND an IP table

-Ability to effectively "route" IP frames based on IP address



Currently, the router module in your ISP-provided box is likely doing the routing at layer 3 and the switch module is doing layer 2 switching.



The multi-purpose box your ISP gives you has a built-in switch that will perform virtually the same as a switch marketing towards gamers. There's a lot of confusion about the terminology usually. Switches, routers, modems, ethernet, all get mixed up and people usually don't even mention WAPs and hardware firewalls!

Answer 8

It routes packets of data based on the MAC address. This operates below the IP layer. The word gaming is nearly irrelevant to the device as there is nothing gaming does that is different to anything else. Switches do not prioritize based on packet type.



Your home router only has TWO ports. The WAN port and an internal one that connects to the, usually, four port switch. It actually has five ports for that internal one. If you, for example, send a print job to your network printer, this is totally internal to your network. The router portion of your device doesn't get involved. No need as the switch sees the destination MAC address and switches accordingly.



I, in the distant past, have used a router with Netbios/Netbeui alone without TCP/IP. Worked fine. TCP/IP speed meters couldn't pick up those packets because it wasn't involved. That protocol isn't routeable so they nearly always put it as the payload of a TCP/IP packet so that it can be routeable.



In that printer example, if you had an IP speed meter in the router, it wouldn't pick up the printer traffic.