Installation manual

AT-2560FX 100 and AT-2560TX 10/100 PCI
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shared hub means that all nodes on the hub must share the 100
Mbps of bandwidth. As stations are added to the hub, the
effective bandwidth available to any individual station gets
smaller.
Think of a shared repeater hub as a single-lane highway that
everyone shares. As the number of vehicles on the highway
increases, the traffic becomes congested and transit time for
individual cars increases.
On a shared hub all nodes must operate at the same speed, either
10 Mbps or 100 Mbps. Fast Ethernet repeaters provide 100 Mbps
of available bandwidth, ten times more than what’s available
with a 10BASE-T repeater.
Repeaters use a well-established, uncomplicated design, making
them highly cost effective for connecting PCs within a
workgroup. These are the most common type of Ethernet hubs in
the installed base.
Switched hubs. In a switched network environment, each port
gets a fixed, dedicated amount of bandwidth. In the highway
scenario, each car has its own lane on a multi-lane highway and
there is no sharing.
In a switched environment, data is sent only to the port which
leads to the proper destination station. Network bandwidth is
not shared among all stations and each new station added to the
hub gets access to the full bandwidth of the network.
If a new user is added to a 100 Mbps switching hub, the new
station receives its own dedicated 100 Mbps link and doesn’t
impact the 100 Mbps bandwidth of another station. Switching
hubs can effectively increase the overall bandwidth available on
the network, significantly improving performance.