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  • What are you going to do if your lovely router that you just bought and hooked up your whole

  • network to ran out of ports?

  • Let's say I have many, many computers in my house, or in my office, and I connected all

  • of the ports that I have here. Most routers will have four ports on them, so I have connected

  • three computers and a printer. But suddenly I wanted to buy another computer. So, that's

  • what the switch is for. A switch is basically kind of like a network surge protector. Just

  • think about it this way. You plug in one output to your router, and the other ones will just

  • split up that connection, to give you more hookups. This is called a four port switch,

  • which will mean it will have actually five ports - one which will be uplink. It will

  • send the signal back to the router - and the other four will split it up for four computers.

  • Switches come in many sizes. They can come in four port size A ports, 16, 32, even 64.

  • And of course, they have much larger more industrial switches for big industrial settings.

  • And they also have different speeds to them. And when I say speed, I'm basically talking

  • about the speed of the port. The basic speed is 10 megabit per second; then you have 100

  • megabit, which is pretty much the standard nowadays. And today, we also have faster switches

  • which are gigabits. So you have 1,000 megabits per second. If you buy a gigabit switch, it's

  • also wise to make sure your computer has a gigabit Ethernet port, and also that your

  • router has a gigabit Ethernet port, otherwise you're not really thinking that that would

  • do it.

  • So, if you have way to many computers for your router to handle, an Ethernet switch

  • is definitely what you need.

What are you going to do if your lovely router that you just bought and hooked up your whole

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