The term ‘switch’ is a broad catch-all for a wide range of computer network technologies. Even so, network hubs, home routers and network bridges are more commonly called switches than other devices. Each of these devices accomplishes a similar job from a switching standpoint, but is often capable of performing additional tasks outside of switching.
The design of each of these devices centers on its wired ports. These ports appear as rectangular openings that are slightly larger than a phone cord. Depending on the type of device, there may only be a handful of these ports or there may be several dozen. Often, these devices have a single port called an uplink or wide area network (WAN) port, but the rest are switch ports.
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By: Eric
