Net + Lessons, Repeaters, Bridges, and Broadcast storms!

Well last time we discussed about Repeaters and Bridges, which were very simple concepts, but today we are going to into the disadvantages of the Bridges!
You see computers send out data packets without specific destination addresses, intended for all the computers it can reach. This is called a broadcast. A major disadvantage of bridge is that they don’t stop the broadcasts! Just think about a spam mailer, he lost his address book, so he just starts sending e-mails to EVERYONE on the internet! Since the broadcast packet doesn’t have a destination, the bridge has no other choice but to send it to everyone’s computer that is connected to the bridge. This can cause a BROADCAST STORM!!! Yeah it sounds scary, but that’s when the bridge sends the broadcasts to every segment on the network. It occurs when there are so many broadcast packets on the network that the capacity of the network bandwidth approaches or reaches saturation. The worst case scenario it can shut down the network!
Now that’s the professional definition of it, but try to take it apart and make it something simpler. Let’s say that you are making a smoothie, and you fill it up with loads of fruits and veggies. But then you start to overflow it, and now the blender won’t even start. You can use any other analogies that you want, as long as you understand the concept. TOO MUCH OF ANYTHING WILL SHUT IT DOWN!
The last thing that we will talk about today is the Routed Networks. See Routers are like the next step after the bridges. Bridges uses the destination MAC address, the Router uses the destination network address to see where a packet should go. Let’s pretend that the number of your house is your MAC, and the Network address is you street name. You can now see why using bridges can cause a broadcast storm right? You’d be sending all that information to anyone with the same numerical address as you. But with Routers it sends it to the STREET Address! Much more simpler.