What Is the Difference Between Hubs & Routers?

Video Transcript

"The difference between hubs and routers and I feel we should include switches in this discussion as well. A hub is basically a port replicator. It turns one jack into multiple jacks. What the hub does not do is it does not prioritize the signals that are sent from each device that's connected to it. So in other words, if you've got three devices hooked up to a hub, those signals are all going to go the exact same time through the network and that's going to cause things to slow down because at the receiving end of that signal, that's going to have to try to figure out what goes first, what goes second. A switch does that for you. A switch will say OK, this is the fastest signal, let's send that one through first, this is next fastest, let's send that one next. It prioritizes the signals from each device connected to it to maximize the connection speed and the flow of traffic through the network. Now a router takes this one step further, it adds some protection measures. A router will allow you to restrict what computers can access what devices, what computers can access what other computers and so forth and so on. So in other words a router will prevent, can prevent all but certain computers from accessing a server for example, a switch will not do that. A switch will transmit whatever it gets and a hub will transmit whatever it gets and not even prioritize it, it will just kind of hit the network with brunt, kind of a brute force attack. Those are the main differences, just prioritization and access control."