Net + Lesson 2... Repeaters, and Bridges

Ok welcome back, last time we talked about LAN, but we never discussed any of the medians that are used to carry certain signals from computer to computer. Now if you think about it, when you send something through any network, does the signal stay strong forever. Think about it this way, when you drive your car down the east coast, say from New York, all the way down to Florida, is that car going to get you there on one tank of gas? Well I know we’ve had some breakthroughs with some hybrid cars, but the answer is no. You’d have to stop at a gas station and fill your car up with gas to make it more powerful, more energized wouldn’t you?
Same thing goes for signals, you see when networks first started out they were very small, it’s understandable because that’s how everything starts out, small. See early network cables had short maximum lengths, so a lot of the signals would become weakened. What could they do in order to re-energize the signal? Well Using a Repeater of course.
Repeater connects network cables by regenerating signals so they can travel on additional cable lengths. I think you understand this concept from the whole car driving example above! Computers on either side of the Repeater could access data on their computers as long as they were using the same media access design and the same protocol and transmission method. It means that if you were in your office, you could log into one computer, open up your desktop and see all of your files. Then you can log off, go to the next computer and log in the same way, and all of your files will be there!
But there is a disadvantage of the Repeaters. They simply pass on any data they receive to both segments that are attached to the device. What this means, is, Say you have 10 computers, and 10 workers. One person wants to send a file to just one other person, but the Repeater sends that file to everyone’s computer. Now imagine if each person on the network wanted to send one file to one other person, that would mean that over a thousand files would be sent over to everyone computer and it could easily flood the network! But there is a solution, and that will be the last thing that we talk about for the day. That solution to this problem is called a BRIDGE! The BRIDGE is just like the Repeater, but it can filter the data that it receives. A great invention, in order to stop the overflow of data going into the network! Study hard, and try to take what you don’t understand, and make it simple!