Ethernet Switches
Advantages
- Problem devices affect only individual ports, not networks as a whole
- Provides mechanism for increasing throughput on single subnet for traffic which does not leave the subnet
- Provides a mechanism (buffering) for delivering the same subnet to multiple (distant) locations without needing to build a repeated network
- Removes the inherit constraint of a collision domain
- Problems
Disadvantages
- Subnet size is now limited by the size of the broadcast domain
- Also true with shared ethernet but not as bad