The Motorola MB8600 was the only modem I tested that self activated to the Comcast ISP. I had to call into Comcast and give them the account information, the modem MAC address, and the device serial number to be able to connect the Motorola MB7420 and NetGear CM600. May 16, 2017 - I'm wondering why Apple never made an all-in-one modem/router combo. I have had good luck with The Wirecutter, they do reviews of stuff. With all of today’s modern devices, some of the terminology can be quite confusing. Pretty much everyone has heard of the term router, but what does it actually mean? Is your router just a router or can it also be a switch, an access point and a gateway? Back in the days, each term above usually referred to a single device that performed a single function. That is no longer true these days. Your “modem” from your ISP is probably a modem, router, switch and access point all-in-one. You don’t necessarily want an all-in-one device as I’ll explain later, though some ISPs push you that way. In this article, I’ll try to explain the concept behind each of these terms without getting too technical. First, I’ll talk about the difference between switches and hubs, as both of those devices are in the same category. Next, we’ll talk about routers and why they are different than switches and hubs. Finally, we’ll talk about modems and other networking terms like access points and gateways. Switches vs Hubs A hub is an obsolete device that you would never want to buy these days. It looks just like a switch, but works differently on the inside. You connect devices to a hub using Ethernet cable and any signal sent from a device to the hub is simply repeated out on all other ports connected to the hub. Hubs are considered Layer 1 (Physical) devices whereas switches are put into Layer 2 (Data Link). This is where hubs and switches differ. The Data Link layer of the OSI model deals with MAC addresses and switches look at MAC addresses when they process an incoming frame on a port. A frame is a data type that is used to carry data on all networking devices. Don’t worry about the technical details, just know that it contains source and destination MAC addresses and source and destination IP addresses inside the frame. The part of the frame that contains the source/destination IP addresses is called a packet. Instead of blindly forwarding all the frames it receives on one port to all the other ports on the device, a switch will create a MAC address source table and then forward the frame to the port with the correct destination MAC address. ![]() This significantly reduces the amount of traffic on the network because there is direct communication between the two devices rather than a one-to-all type of communication. With hubs, the more devices you connect to the hub, the more collisions there will be on the network. Collisions means when two computers or devices send data at the same time and the signals physically collide before reaching the destination. This happens on hubs a lot because all the traffic coming in on each port is repeated out to all the other ports. With switches, there are zero collisions because only the two devices that are communicating will be sending data back and forth. The bandwidth is not shared with other ports. This is also why a hub is a half-duplex device whereas a switch is a full-duplex device.
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