How Switching Works | Network Fundamentals Part 11
Welcome to the start of switching! Communication is not new, not even electronic communication. In the old days, to make a telephone call, a switchboard operator needed to patch though your call. This means that they had to manually create a path for your phone call to take.

Switching is a lot like this. Switching dynamically creates paths for network traffic to flow through. But it doesn’t do this all on its own. Ethernet, a protocol that operates at layer 2, is critical to how this works.

Each device that uses ethernet has a MAC address. Frames are sent from one MAC address to another. Clever devices like bridges and hubs learn these addresses, and can make better decisions about how traffic is handled because of this knowledge.

It wasn’t always this way though. In the early days we had bus and ring networks, and eventually hubs. These did not have any intelligence, and operated solely at layer 1. They were also only half-duplex, and had to handle collisions.

In this video, we walk through the past, and see how it affects the switching networks that we have today.

Finally we’ll go through a lab to see it all in action.


Lab: https://networkdirection.net/labsandq...
Quiz: https://networkdirection.net/labsandq...


The CCENT/CCNA study guide (affiliate): https://click.linksynergy.com/link?id...

In the next video, we’re taking it further with VLANs


Overview of this video:

0:00 Introduction

2:22 Ethernet

7:31 Adding Hubs

11:16 Improving with Bridges

16:58 Introducing Switches

21:02 Lab Time

Vintage footage from:
   • 1939 Film: New Zealand Shortwave Comm...  
   • Video  
   • Episode 11: Computers at Work  


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