Introduction; Benefits Of Using Switching Technology - NETGEAR FS518 Installation Manual

Chapter 1

Introduction

Congratulations on your purchase of the NETGEAR Model FS518 Fast Ethernet Switch. This
switch provides you with a low-cost, high-performance network solution and is designed to
support power workgroups operating at either 10 megabits per second (Mbps) or 100 Mbps.
To relieve server and backbone bottlenecks, the Model FS518 switch also has two Gigabit Ethernet
fiber uplink ports.
Benefits of Using Switching Technology
A majority of installed networks today are based on shared network technology. With this
technology, a number of users or groups of users share a total available network bandwidth (or
network capacity) of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, or other amounts of network bandwidth. For example,
with a total of 10 users, the average bandwidth available to each user on a 10 Mbps network is
calculated as 10/10 Mbps, which equals 1 Mbps of bandwidth per user. On a 100 Mbps (Fast
Ethernet) network, the average bandwidth available to each of the 10 users is 100/10 Mbps, which
equals 10 Mbps of bandwidth per user.
Ethernet switches significantly increase network throughput by segmenting network traffic. They
check traffic coming in to each port to learn which network device is located on which segment.
Based on this information, switches forward cross-segment traffic only to the appropriate segment.
The traffic will not show up in the other segments because it is filtered out. In this way, network
capacity is fully reserved for traffic destined for that segment only, and other segments will not
be saturated with unnecessary traffic.
Ethernet switches provide private, dedicated, 10 Mbps (or 100 Mbps) capacity to each connected
PC/server or hub/workgroup segment, which is significantly higher than in a shared environment.
The higher bandwidth enables the use of applications such as multimedia, imaging, video, or
high-performance client-server functions among users who are spread out over the network.
Introduction 1-1