[dundee] Telewest Broadband 512Kb

[Jonathan Barber]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2004 at 07:31:50PM +0000, Steven A. McIntosh wrote:
> On Friday 16 January 2004 18:00, Andrew Clayton wrote:
> 
> >
> > The contentions are different and the way the traffic flows is
> > different. IIRC everybody on the same bit of cable sees everyone elses
> > traffic (a bit like a LAN, but in an uncontrolled environment) which
> > isn't ideal.
> 
> If its like a LAN although the data is broadcast to all IP addresses,
> only the 
> one that has the card with the correct MAC address can answer, or have I 
> completely misunderstood the basics of TCP/IP networking.

If all the machines are on a hub and a machine sends a TCP/IP packet
out, then all of the machines on the hub will receive it.

If all the machines are on a switch, then the switch will send the
packet down only the cable that the ethernet card is on.

It knows which cable this is, as it can use ARP to match up IP addresses
with ethernet MAC addresses, if there is no hit in ARP it knows where to
send it next using TCP/IP routing.

It's basically a question of (virtual and physical) network topology as
to which machine sees what, but cable seems to act like a hubbed network
for the segment of cable that the machine resides upon.

> > Plus BY do all kinds of nasty stuff to your traffic.
> >
> Such as ?
> 
> Regards
> 
> Steven
-- 
Jon