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Ethernet Switching: MAC Tables, Flooding & Port Security

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Layer 2 switching: smarter than a hub

A hub is a simple repeater — it copies every frame to every port. This wastes bandwidth and creates a single collision domain. A switch builds a MAC address table by observing source addresses on incoming frames, then forwards unicast frames only to the specific port that destination MAC was last seen on.

This provides full-duplex operation (no collisions), dedicated bandwidth per port, and traffic isolation between endpoints.

Packets in motion — click to inspect:

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