Differences between switches and routers and optical module collocation scheme.xpon olt wholesale

As we all know, a switch is a network device used for electrical (optical) signal forwarding, while a router is a hardware device that connects two or more networks and acts as a gateway between networks. It is a special intelligent network device that reads the address in each packet and then decides how to transmit it. Next, ETU-LINK will introduce the differences between them in detail.

First of all, their working scenarios are different. Routers are used in the network layer, while switches are used in the link layer. The main work of both is to forward data, but the difference is that they rely on different addresses. Routers rely on IP addresses to forward datagrams to the next station, and switches rely on MAC addresses to look up MAC addresses in their own tables according to the header information of the received data frames. If there is one, they will forward it, and if not, they will give up.

In addition, the switch is used for data forwarding within the LAN, while the router is used to connect the LAN and the external network. The router integrates the functions of the switch, and the host can also be connected to the router to achieve data forwarding, but the disadvantage is that there are not as many scalable interfaces as the switch.

Although the internal structures of the two are different, the optical interconnection products used are roughly the same. Routers and switches need to use optical modules and fiber jumpers to achieve interconnection between network devices. Generally, gigabit switches can be equipped with gigabit optical modules and gigabit optical modules. We need to select the optical modules corresponding to the transmission distance according to the distance between network devices. For example, if the equipment spacing is 300m, we can choose gigabit multimode optical module (ES8512-3LCD05) or 10 gigabit multimode 300m optical module (ES85X-3LCD03) with multimode jumper to realize the interconnection between network equipment.