bridge vs switch

hankooknara

on page 13 of cisco press ICND book, it talks about fowarding unknown unicasts and broadcasts from bridge and switch.

It says bridges foward lan broadcast frames, and unknown unicast frames, out all ports and switch forwards broadcasts out all ports, except the one on which the broadcast was received.

so

bridge - foward broadcast and unknown unicast all ports
switch - foward broadcast all ports except which it was received.
unknown unicast on all ports

Is this correct? I thought bridge and switch is using same??
Can someone make this clear for me please?

mp3spy

hankooknara wrote:

on page 13 of cisco press ICND book, it talks about fowarding unknown unicasts and broadcasts from bridge and switch.

It says bridges foward lan broadcast frames, and unknown unicast frames, out all ports and switch forwards broadcasts out all ports, except the one on which the broadcast was received.

so

bridge - foward broadcast and unknown unicast all ports
switch - foward broadcast all ports except which it was received.
unknown unicast on all ports

Is this correct? I thought bridge and switch is using same??
Can someone make this clear for me please?

Yea I was reading your quote from the book and I remember exactly when I read that part. I was a little confused too...I could us some clarity as well....Good Question.

DirtySouth

Similar to a switch, a bridge will forward based on MAC address out all ports except for the port the frame originated from.

wildfire

ok,

The term bridge was origionally used to break-up collision domains in 802.3 networks, the device stored the MAC address of all devices in a segment, initially they seperated 2 segments. This was all done in software. This is all done at Layer 2 of the OSI

Then came the switch which is basicialy a multiport bridge where a lot of the switching is done in hardware rather than software.

You will find in networking the term Bridge and Switch to mean the same thing often. For example when you year about Spanning Tree the term Bridge is used.

HTH