Hub v Switch

This article stems from a remote support issue that dragged on for weeks. They were located on another continent, and there were repeated reports of disconnections.

Desktop PCs were swapped, and patching cables were swapped. Still no improvement; it's only when I said we have to try another port, and they said they will need to get another switch under the desk. It was not a switch. It was a hub, and they ran out of ports under each desk years ago and had started to daisy chain the cheapest hub they could find.

They needed to add updated switches to the communications room and run patch cables to all the desks.

This issue came back years later when they upgraded phones to VOIP, and they used the port on the back of the phone that was only 100 MB, so the PC went from 1GB port to 100MB, no issue for most people apart from a business-critical app that would timeout on the slower connection.

I found some of my original troubleshooting notes to get them to upgrade all the switches.

Hub v Switch

A 10 port hub with 100MB/s connection will divide the available 100MB bandwidth between all attached workstations on the HUB.

Testing one workstation when all other workstations are online will give 100MB bandwidth.

If all 10 workstations are active, you will only receive 10% off available bandwidth.

if one device is configured to 10MB/s ,the all devices will run at speed of the slowest device 10 MB/s

Dual speed hubs will run two segments at the same time. 100MB/s in one segment and 10MB/s in the other segment. This function will stop faster devices from running at the lowest speed.

When troubleshooting unmanaged HUBs, all devices on the HUB need to be checked

A large file being copied on a workstation connected to a 100 MB/s HUB could take 100 seconds to copy with no other active devices on the hub 1000s to copy when all ten devices are active on the HUB and 10000s when a printer with 10MB/s Ethernet connection to the HUB.

This is the main reason you will never get a 48 port HUB. If a HUB is to be used, Class II should be used. Class I should be upgraded to Class II. The most common problem with Hubs is linking multiple Hubs in a chain to extend a network. Hubs should be disconnected from a chain and plugged into a switch.

The workstation configuration for connection to HUBs is Half Duplex, and the Workstation Configuration for connection to Switch is Full Duplex

Years later, I had a similar issue in my office, not across the world on another continent. I spent two hours on my knees crawling under desks, trying to find a live, reliable network port. after finding ten fault network points, I purchased a port analyser for four hundred pounds.

The problem was that people were playing musical chairs with the faulty ports. If the user has a connection issue, they would swap it with another one. And if a new phone was need the phone guy woud unpatch any ports in the rack that did not have a light, so any one on a day off whow switche off their PC would have a dead port when they got back.