Linksys EG0008 manual 1000, Switches Versus Hubs

Instant Gigabit™ Series

The LED Indicators

Power	Green. The Power LED lights up when the Switch is pow-
	ered on.
1000	Green. The 1000 LED lights up when the port is operating at
	1000Mbps. If the LED is off, the port is operating at either
	100Mbps, 10Mbps, or it is not active.
100	Green. The 100 LED lights up when the port is operating at
	100Mbps. If this LED is off, the port is operating at either
	1000Mbps, 10Mbps, or it is not active.
10	Amber. The 10 LED lights up when the port is operating at
	10Mbps. If this LED is off, the port is operating at either
	1000Mbpd, 100Mbps, or it is not active.
TX	Green. The TX (Transmit) LED flickers when data is being
	transmitted through the port. When the LED is off, there is
	no data being transferred through the port.
RX	Amber. The RX (Receive) LED flickers when data is being
	received through the port. When the LED is off, there is no
	data being transferred through the port.
FD/COL	Green. If the FD/COL (Full Duplex/Collision) LED is lit up
	continuously, the connection made through the correspon-
	ding port is running in Full Duplex mode. If the LED is flick-
	ering, the port is experiencing data collisions. Infrequent
	collisions are normal. If this LED is flickering too often,
	there may be a problem with your connection.

EtherFast® 10/100/1000 8-Port GigaSwitch

Switches Versus Hubs

Your GigaSwitch boosts your network performance several times over, con- serving your time, money and resources. The Switch’s 10/100/1000 feature gives you a key advantage over other forms of networking by upgrading speed-critical network segments to 1000Mbps while allowing existing 10BaseT and 100BaseTX networks to operate with the Switch. Allowing 10BaseT and 100BaseTX hardware speeds to run alongside each other elimi- nates the need to purchase new hardware, rewire and reconfigure an entire site all at once. This scalability factor ensures that Fast Ethernet will not fall obsolete to upgrades in speed standards and maintains use of all your old equipment until you decide to buy speedier replacements.

Switches also feature full-duplex data transfer, meaning that all computers on the switch can “talk” to the switch at the same time. Plus, switches can send and receive data simultaneously to all connections, whereas a hub can- not. A hub simply works with one computer at a time and only sends or receives data, since it cannot handle two way communication.

In addition to full-duplex transfer, your Switch surges your network with dedicated bandwidth to each node. For instance, if you connect 8 comput- ers to your EtherFast 10/100/1000 8-Port GigaSwitch , then each computer will get a dedicated bandwidth of 2000Mbps at full duplex transfer. If you run 8 computers from a 100Mbps hub, then each computer will only share a part of the 100Mbps bandwidth.

A network without a switch is called a shared network because every node on the network competes for a fraction of the total bandwidth. In a shared network, data packets are randomly broadcasted to all stations until they discover their intended destination. Consequently, considerable time and bandwidth is wasted on data packets swimming along network lines before they find their correct address. A switch, on the other hand, looks at the address for each data packet and delivers it directly to the correct destination.

Gigabit Ethernet is ideal for deployment as a backbone interconnect, and as a connection to high-performance servers. With the addition of Gigabit Ethernet, Ethernet delivers scalable solution (10/100/1000 Mbps) for the LAN from the desktop to the workgroup, and the backbone.

4 5