The company subsequently produced multi-port switches for both Ethernet and FDDI such as GigaSwitch. The first 2 port Bridge product (LANBridge 100) was introduced by that company shortly after. The first MAC Bridge was invented in 1983 by Mark Kempf, an engineer in the Networking Advanced Development group of Digital Equipment Corporation. Switches for Ethernet are the most common form of network switch.

Such switches are commonly known as layer-3 switches or multilayer switches. Some switches can also forward data at the network layer (layer 3) by additionally incorporating routing functionality. Avaya ERS 2550T-PWR, a 50-port Ethernet switchĪ network switch (also called switching hub, bridging hub, and, by the IEEE, MAC bridge ) is networking hardware that connects devices on a computer network by using packet switching to receive and forward data to the destination device.Ī network switch is a multiport network bridge that uses MAC addresses to forward data at the data link layer (layer 2) of the OSI model.

Tor switch definition