Are all hubs/switches created equal?

[freedon]

I can understand a $1,000 Cisco switch has features a $50 linksys doesn't. But hubs/switches below $100 is there any difference between them?

do they manage packages different?

[anfpunk]

I've never noticed a difference between the cheap hubs/switches. I wish someone would come out with a cheaper managed switch though.

[Isezumi]

most of the time your paying for the name brand...which is sometimes benefical... 30-60-90 day warranties don't help me sleep easy at night.

[padijun]

Obviously several factors come into play. For hubs... signal regeneration (if any), number of ports, quality of the housing, and the type of hub... active, passive, or "intelligent" (intelligent hub is an oxymoron, hahah).

Most of those features should be taken into account when rating switches, but they differ from hubs in the fact that they have switching tables and can microsegment. Hubs just broadcast to every computer on the network. All computers receive the signals, meaning there is a larger collision doman. Switches keep MAC addrss tables for temporary direct connections between 2 computers. This is why hubs are referred to as "the switch's retarded cousin".

[Option_Man]

If there is something specific that you will be doing with your equipment, check it out to make sure you can. Some of the cheaper equipment do have different basic features.

[freedon]

I knew the switch is considered an inteligent hub

Warranty nor signal regeneration, good points

[ATilaptops]

Could a $1000 Cisco switch provide splitting of my cable net without slow downs?

[ua549]

Originally posted by ATilaptops
Could a $1000 Cisco switch provide splitting of my cable net without slow downs?

Your concept of splitting your cable connection is not correct. The bandwidth is shared, but it is never split. Data flows at the rated speed - also called signaling speed or wire speed. A 1.544 T1.5 circuit always runs at 1.544Mbps no matter how many users there are. The key here is that a typical PC uses very little bandwidth on a continuous basis. Bandwidth use is spikey unless doing large data transfers. Most of the time the connection between you and your ISP is running at < 5% capacity. As a matter of fact most PCs cannot drive a T1.5 circuit at full capacity because the PCI bus is a bottleneck. Because of this it is easy for many PCs to share a circuit without any negative impact on performance.

Think of it as a road. Other cars can use that road with no slowdowns - everyone travels at the same speed. However, at some point the road becomes overused and congested. This results in errors and collisions. Same as on a data network.

[padijun]

Originally posted by freedonX
I knew the switch is considered an inteligent hub

Actually an intelligent hub is different from a switch... I don't think it operates on mac addresses. And if it does operate on mac or IP addys, then I don't know why they don't refer to them as switches or routers.

[gameboy1234]

Originally posted by padijun
And if it does operate on mac ... addys, then I don't know why they don't refer to them as switches ...

I think that's what he's refering too, intelligent hub is just another name for switch. Before a lot of this equipment became essentially commodity items, there were a lot of different marketing buzz words for each company's equipment. "Intelligent hub" may have been somebody's word for a switch with no management features, for example.

[ua549]

I also heard the term applied to managed hubs.

[padijun]

Originally posted by gameboy1234
I think that's what he's refering too, intelligent hub is just another name for switch.

That's a misnomer if ever I've heard one. There's a device called and intelligent hub that's a multiport reapeater with diagnostic and troubleshooting features, but it's completely different from a switch. I guess calling a switch that would have been acceptable a decade ago, with advertising execs throwing buzzwords around. Currently, however, they're not synonymous.

[sbobz]

you may be thinking of 'switched hubs', which appears to be a hub, but internally are multiple hubs connected via a switch. This isn't too beneficial, except to split collision domains, and very limited use of MAC tables.