Network hardware is generally anything that is used to transport data from one point to another. There are three types of network hardware. They include routers, switches and network interface cards. A router is a network device that combines many networks, whether wired or wireless. When data is on transit, a router executes commands according to how they have been requested by the user. In so doing, the router serves as network hardware as it is moving data from one point to the next. This is called routing. However, not all routers are network hardware. In homes, many people use the internet protocol router, which combines the home area network to the wide area network on the internet.
Another type of network hardware is switches. Switches act as a network device that has many ports. They are therefore used to connect many ports with one local area network. The task of switches is to duplicate frames on different ports. Switches work at the data link layer, which is the second level of the OSI model. Switches store addresses of every device that is connected to its network, evaluate all the data that passes through them, and determine where the data should go. If the switch does not know the address, it transmits the data to all its ports because it does not know where to paste the data. Before the introduction of switches, machines used hubs, which pasted all data to all ports on the network. This means that even data that was not required on a certain port were pasted there anyway until moved by the user.
Another type of network hardware similar to the switch is the bridge. This is like a switch except that it has two ports. However, due to the introduction of switches, which have many ports, bridges are no longer in production. This is mainly because switches are more intelligent than hubs and therefore minimize the use of bandwith. Hubs multiply the same information to ports that do not even need that information while switches only send the data to the ports that require them.
The third type of network hardware is network interface cards. This card enables a computer to connect to a local area network. Examples include the Ethernet card, token ring cards and the wireless network cards. Most machines are today built with internal network interfaces. This reduces the need to have an external one.
Resources You May Like:
