Difference between a payment switch and a router

What is the difference between a payment switch and that of a router?

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A payment switch is a server that creates digital representations of conventional financial instruments, and forwards authentic payment orders on these instruments to their corresponding conventional financial networks and institutions. When someone pays a credit card bill online, the payment switch would manage the processing and forwarding of that particular bill payment.

A router is a network layer hardware device that uses one or more metrics to determine the optimal path along which network traffic should be forward. Routers forward packets from one network to another based on network layer information contained in the routing table. Routing protocols accomplish routing through the implementation of a specific routing algorithm. Examples of popular routing protocols include EIGRP, OSPF and BGP. Cisco is the leading router vendor and owns 80% of the market share. Juniper is an up and coming router vendor that is giving Cisco strong competition in the router market for Service Providers.

This was first published in July 2002

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