What is the difference in the functioning of a switch and a bridge?

What is the difference between the functioning of the switch and the bridge? Does the bridge pass the packet to LAN segment or to the device inside that's using its MAC address?

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Bridges and switches work on same OSI layer, but the basic difference is in the functionality they provide. Basic differences between a bridge vs switch would be that bridges would be used to over come limitations posed by distance and at the same time minimizing traffic. Switches will be used more from a management perspective where you can create VLANs so that you can have separate broadcast domains for your subnets.

Also bridges can be used to connect different types of media token ring to Ethernet, or token ring to FDDI.

Switches are used more from their filtering capabilities.

Bridges are strictly in Layer 2 but you get switches that can work up to Layer 3 and with modules can go up to Layer 7 with add on service modules.

This was first published in June 2003

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