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HOME TOPICS SEARCH ABOUT ME Your article had some errors in fact that could lead people to think that all routers will provide the benefits you describe. |
technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 Routers and switches: A reader demystifies the topicApril 8, 2001 Dear Al, I am a regular reader of your columns and greatly enjoy them. Your technical tips have often been helpful to me in configuring my PC's. However, your article last week about the Linksys router had some errors in fact that could lead people to think that all routers will provide the benefits you describe. The Linksys router only functions as a router when directing traffic from your local network to and from your Internet connection. The ports for connecting your local network devices are SWITCHED Fast Ethernet ports. You gained speed on your local network over using a hub because switched ports eliminate collisions that occur with hubs when two devices try to transmit at the same time. Switched Fast Ethernet ports can also operate in full duplex mode allowing a PC to both receive and transmit data simultaneously. If your hub was standard Ethernet, you also benefited from the increase in network speed from 10 Mbit to 100Mbit. Routers are all store and forward devices so they actually introduce additional delay in transmission over a network. If the Linksys router was routing between your PC's, performance would actually be slower. Your readers could mistakenly buy another brand or model of router expecting the performance gain you described and be disappointed if the ports built into it were not switched and/or were slower speed. Also, Ethernet networks do not pass data from one device to the next until it gets to the one that is supposed to get it. On a hub, all devices receive the message at the same time. Data received on one port is repeated on all ports at once and without any significant delay. A switch like that included in the Linksys router looks at the destination MAC (hardware) address in the message and sends the data out only on the port where that destination address is located. Since only those two ports are in use, a third device can also transmit data to a fourth device or to the router device to be passed on to the Internet. Keep up the good work. Somebody has to keep Microsoft honest. I am from the same generation as you and have seen previous companies with market dominance (monopoly) stifle innovation to protect their market. My home firewall is on Linux. Jack Haynes |