When networking your home or a customer’s home, there are many things to consider. One of these things to consider is how many dropdown menus there will be in the house. Will the end user need more than 1 ethernet cable in their room or office? Well, Linksys makes this decision easy by offering a 5-port workgroup switch that allows you to share an Internet connection quickly and easily.
Meaning: What having a switch basically means is that you can share an Internet connection from an Ethernet line (RJ45) with up to four other networked devices (the amount of sharing increases with higher models). The easiest way to understand a basic switch is that, ideally, it’s a splitter, just like you’d split your coaxial cable to have TVs in multiple rooms. On the inside, however, a switch serves many more purposes than meets the eye.
A switch is basically a smart hub (a hub is a device that repeats all packets on all ports, there is no address or security control). When a user has a hub, chances are small situations are fine. However, when a user wants to network many devices, a hub will be insufficient. A hub transmits everything that is sent to any PC connected to all ports. What this means is that your data is not considered secure and could be easily viewed by anyone. This also means that your network will be insufficient. When I say insufficient, I mean that there will be a lot of traffic and possible collisions of the packets being sent through the hub. This is considered a collision domain. A collision domain is when multiple devices on the network send packets out all ports at the same time and their packets collide, eventually being dropped.
So what the switch does instead is solve this problem by mapping a table within itself of all the MACs (Media Access Controllers) on your network (or directly connected to your switch). This allows the devices (switch) to send the packet to the correct port. This allows for far fewer collisions and a faster network. Basically, think of a switch as a train station, and everything routes correctly. Also for clarification purposes, think of a hub as a traffic light where all the lights are green. The difference? One will provide a smooth network (the switch), and another will provide a clunky network with the risk of possible failures (the hub).
Setting: Setting up this device couldn’t be easier, and everything is plug and play! You just have to connect the device to AC power, allow it to boot up (basically instantly), and plug the ethernet cable that has internet into a port. Then you need to connect the other ethernet cables that you want to give internet access to the others. Upon configuration, the switch will use a protocol called ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) to find the MAC addresses of devices that are now connected to the switch. Once the MAC addresses are found, you should have access to the network and the Internet. Note that these MAC tables created on the switch are cleared from time to time to detect new devices and clear the memory of old devices that are no longer on the switch.
Classification: I’ve been using this version of the Linksys 5-Port Workgroup Switch for almost a year now and have only good things to say. The network never has hiccups and devices have instant access to the network. I would recommend anyone looking for a solution for more RJ45 connections to look into a switch before rerouting their home with Cat5, 5e or 6 cable!