What does a Fast 10/100 Lan Switch do?

Question

I don't know much about computers. And I would like to learn what exactly is this product.

Answer 1

I think you are referring to a standard 10/100 Ethernet switch. A switch operates at the data-link layer of the OSI model to create a different collision domain per switch port. This is a cute way of saying that if you have 4 computers A/B/C/D on 4 switch ports, then A and B can transfer data between them as well as C and D at the same time, and they will never interfere with each others conversations. Of course there's more to it but that's the basic idea. Now if this were a "hub" then they would all have to share the bandwidth, run in half-duplex and there would be collisions and retransmissions. Using a switch is called microsegmentation and it allows you to have dedicated bandwidth on point to point connections with every computer and can therefore run in full duplex with no collisions.

The 10/100 means that the Ethernet switch ports (wether there a 4, 8, 16, 24, or some other number of ports) can run at either speed, 10Mbps (megabits per second) or 100Mbps, and they typically have auto-negotiation enabled by default so when you connect a computer they will automagically decide on the speed and duplex settings, such as 10Mbps half duplex or 100Mbps full duplex for example. The 100Mbps bandwidth is referred to as "fast ethernet". Faster Ethernet connections are now also available at 1Gbps and 10Gbps. If you are new to computers and networking and want to learn more about this and other related topics, I'd suggest poking around on wikipedia for starters. Some links follow, and see the "see also" articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Ethernet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonegotiation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_switch

Answer 2

a switch and a hub basically do the same thing..connect computers

When a hub receives a packet (chunk) of data (a frame in Ethernet lingo) at one of its ports from a PC on the network, it transmits (repeats) the packet to all of its ports and, thus, to all of the other PCs on the network. If two or more PCs on the network try to send packets at the same time a collision is said to occur. When that happens all of the PCs have to go though a routine to resolve the conflict.

An Ethernet switch automatically divides the network into multiple segments, acts as a high-speed, selective bridge between the segments, and supports simultaneous connections of multiple pairs of computers which don't compete with other pairs of computers for network bandwidth. It accomplishes this by maintaining a table of each destination address and its port. When the switch receives a packet, it reads the destination address from the header information in the packet, establishes a temporary connection between the source and destination ports, sends the packet on its way, and then terminates the connection.

hope this helps