LevelOne GEP-0950 - Manual (Page 31)

3-5. How does a switch work?
The switch is a layer 2 Ethernet Switch equipped with 8 Gigabit Ethernet
ports and 1 optional module which support Gigabit Ethernet or 100M Ethernet. Each
port on it is an independent LAN segment and thus has 9 LAN segments and 9
collision domains, contrast to the traditional shared Ethernet HUB in which all ports
share the same media and use the same collision domain and thus limit the
bandwidth utilization. With switch’s separated collision domain, it can extend the
LAN diameter farther than the shared HUB does and highly improve the efficiency
of the traffic transmission.
Due to the architecture, the switch can provide full-duplex operation to
double the bandwidth per port and many other features, such as VLAN, bandwidth
aggregation and so on, not able to be supported in a shared hub.