Circuit or Packet Switching?

About this interactive

Early telephone networks used circuit switching. An operator, and later an automatic switch, connected your line to the other caller's, and that path stayed yours until you hung up. Multiplexing let several conversations share one line by giving each its own repeating time slot, but each slot was still reserved, whether anyone was talking or not. For a phone call that is fine: you do not want the call to drop because you paused. Computer traffic is different. It comes in bursts, sometimes a lot and sometimes almost nothing, so a reserved path sits idle most of the time and nobody else can use it. Packet switching breaks the data into small packets and sends each one into the network on its own. Nothing is reserved: the links carry whoever has something to send right now. Packets from one conversation can take different routes and are put back together at the far end. That makes the network cheaper to run, easier to grow, and able to route around a failed link.

What you'll learn

Tell circuit switching from packet switching by what happens on the line: a path reserved for one conversation for its whole length, or small packets that share the links and can each take a different route
Explain why packet switching took over for computer traffic: bursty traffic wastes a reserved circuit, while shared links scale better, cost less and can route around a failure

Aligned to

CompTIA Network+

1.6 Compare and contrast network topologies, architectures, and types.

2.1 Explain characteristics of routing technologies.

Cisco CCNA

1.2 Describe characteristics of network topology architectures

Cisco CCST Networking

1.1 Identify the fundamental conceptual building blocks of networks

4.4 Explain basic routing concepts

ISC2 CC

4.1 Understand network security

Key terms

Circuit Switching: A communication method that establishes a dedicated physical path between two devices for the duration of a connection.
Packet Switching: A communication method that breaks data into packets and sends them independently across a network, potentially via different routes.
Multiplexing: A technique that allows multiple signals or conversations to share a single communication channel by dividing it into time slots or channels.
Bandwidth: The maximum rate of data transfer across a network path, typically measured in bits per second.
Packet: A unit of data formatted for transmission over a network, containing a header, payload, and sometimes a trailer.

Topics

Circuit Switching Packet Switching Multiplexing Bandwidth Interactive Streak Sort

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