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On Friday 14 Nov 2003 7:04 pm, Michael Chidley wrote: > Hi, > > Does anybody know what is the difference between an `ADSL Bridge` and an > `ADSL Router`? The ADSL is irrelevant to the difference, it works the same with ISDN etc. (I may have all this wrong, but I think this is how it works) Basically it's more intelligent bandwidth allocations. A router doesn't do any more work than a hub as far as sharing bandwidth within the local network. A bridge is more akin to a switch which ensures that each machine gets the full bandwidth available. A hub sends packets to all machines, whereas a switch knows which machines don't need to be bothered with which packets. Bridges and switches become more important, the more machines you have on the local network - I can't see it makes any odds if it's only one machine connected to the internet. However, if you have two or three machines all using the internet (or local network connections) at the same time, a hub is going to cause more packet collisions and therefore a reduced usable bandwidth. Bridges can be setup to join two hubs - in effect briding two networks - without causing the packet collisions that would be likely if you simply used Cat5 to connect the two hubs. So if someone is downloading a distro on one machine and someone else wants to view some network shares using a different machine, I think a hub would be slower than a switch. Obviously if both want internet access it doesn't work in quite the same way (bottleneck is elsewhere), but if one is internet and one is local, a switch becomes very useful. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.codehelp.co.uk/ http://www.dclug.org.uk/ http://www.isbn.org.uk/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/ http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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