What is the difference between a router and a switch?

A switch sorts and distributes the network packets sent between the devices on a local area network (LAN), while a router is a gateway that connects two or more networks, which can be any combination of LANs, wide area networks (WAN), or the Internet. In addition, a router uses tables to determine the best path to use to distribute the network packets it receives, and a protocol such as ICMP to communicate with other routers. A router is a significantly more complicated device than a switch--essentially a specialized computer--and more advanced models may use a reconfigurable operating system such as Linux, rather than firmware coded directly into the hardware. Both routers and switches operate on layers 2 and 3 of the OSI model.

In an enterprise environment, routers and switches are separate physical devices dedicated to their specific tasks. However, typical "broadband routers" for the home and small office are actually multifunction devices that combine the capabilities of a router, a switch, and (usually) a firewall into one box. In addition to routing traffic between the Internet and the LAN, they also handle switching for packets between devices on the LAN, and often add additional features such as port forwarding and triggering, a DMZ, a DHCP server, a DNS proxy, and/or network address translation. In addition, "wi-fi routers" add a wireless access point.


Note: A hub is even simpler than a switch. Instead of inspecting the packets that it encounters and sending them to the correct destination device, it just forwards them to all connected devices.


In short, Router routes any traffic comes to it & Switch provides local services to local user's in LAN but some special Switches are out their that work for both LAN & WAN. They are much expensive and used by the big Organizations.

A router connects 2 separate networks (e.g. WAN and LAN)
A switch connects all network components (like computers, network printers, etc) within a network.
A switch does essentially what a hub does but more efficiently. By paying attention to the traffic that comes across it, it can "learn" where particular addresses are. For example, if it sees traffic from machine A coming in on port 2, it now knows that machine A is connected to that port and that traffic to machine A needs to only be sent to that port and not any of the others. The net result of using a switch over a hub is that most of the network traffic only goes where it needs to rather than to every port. On busy networks this can make the network significantly faster.
A router is the smartest and most complicated of the bunch. Routers come in all shapes and sizes from the small four-port broadband routers that are very popular right now to the large industrial strength devices that drive the internet itself. A simple way to think of a router is as a computer that can be programmed to understand, possibly manipulate, and route the data its being asked to handle. For example, broadband routers include the ability to "hide" computers behind a type of firewall which involves slightly modifying the packets of network traffic as they traverse the device. All routers include some kind of user interface for configuring how the router will treat traffic. The really large routers include the equivalent of a full-blown programming language to describe how they should operate as well as the ability to communicate with other routers to describe or determine the best way to get network traffic from point A to point B
Different router and different switches can all do different things. The dividing line between all these devices is getting very fine. However one major difference between a router and a switch is that a router has it's own IP address. This allows you to log into it.

Aswell as that most home routers have wireless capabilities (thats the only reason why most home users want them in the first place anyway).
Different router and different switches can all do different things. The dividing line between all these devices is getting very fine. However one major difference between a router and a switch is that a router has it's own IP address. This allows you to log into it.

Aswell as that most home routers have wireless capabilities (thats the only reason why most home users want them in the first place anyway