What is the difference between a router and a hub?
I’m not the expert but off the top of my head, there are three general classes of consumer network-interconnect equipment. Hubs operate in broadcast mode for all the packets that are processed. That is, when one computer sends data, it broadcasts the packet to every machine plugged into the hub. If it is not the intended machine the packet is rejected or discarded, which is why hubs indicate ‘collisions’. Hubs are no longer of much use in network applications. Switches operate such that the sending machine knows the IP address and path of the receiving machine, and sends packets only to the destination machine. Routers are sophisticated machines that typically have a BIOS, OS, routing protocol and memory. They record and analyze data so that the quickest ‘routes’ between two points are constantly analyzed. One protocol, OSPF (open shortest point first) for example monitors many different routes of sending packets to a destination by regularly sending ICMP or TCP packets, and updates a
A router is the smartest and most complicated of the bunch. Routers come in all shapes and sizes from the small four-port broadband routers that are very popular right now to the large industrial strength devices that drive the internet itself. A simple way to think of a router is as a computer that can be programmed to understand, possibly manipulate, and route the data its being asked to handle. For example, broadband routers include the ability to “hide” computers behind a type of firewall which involves slightly modifying the packets of network traffic as they traverse the device. All routers include some kind of user interface for configuring how the router will treat traffic. The really large routers include the equivalent of a full-blown programming language to describe how they should operate as well as the ability to communicate with other routers to describe or determine the best way to get network traffic from point A to point B. A quick note on one other thing that you’ll o
A hub is a connection that allows multiple computers to be connected together with no interaction on the part of the Hub. A router on the other hand connects computers but routes the internet packets to the correct computers instead of sending all packets to all computers. Thus having interaction with the computers.
