What is Ethernet switching?
From a functional point of view, switching is exactly the same as bridging. However switches use specially designed hardware called Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) to perform the bridging and packet-forwarding functionality (as supposed to implementations using a central CPU and special software). Consequently, switches are much faster than bridges. Ethernet switches also offer additional capabilities such as virtual LANs (VLANs) and full duplex connectivity. * Ethernet Errors and Troubleshooting *What is a collision, and how many collisions are bad? Ethernet networking uses collisions as one of the contention access methods. When the network carrier is not active, any station can send information. If two stations attempt to send information at the same time, the signals overlap with each other, creating a collision. Collisions are not errors! Many people misinterpret a flashing collision light or a collision counter as a network problem! Although the term ‘collision’
