Collision Domains and How to Manage Them

Collision Domains are layer 2 segments where computers can communicate over ethernet.  But what happens when your layer 2 ethernet segment gets too noisy and packets start colliding. Your network performance goes down the toilet and you starts getting complaints from your users.  Not a good thing!

Welcome to the Party –  Overcrowded Collision Domains

A layer 2 Ethernet segment is like a big room.  It very easy for two people to talk n a room, they simply start talking.  But what if more people enter the room and begin to speak.  It starts to get noisy and a little harder to carry on your conversation.  It get be done, it just a little more difficult.  Now imagine and very large room filled with a lot of people, everyone talk to each other.  It get pretty noisy doesn’t it?   Imagine you are at a party and everyone is talking while you’re trying to have a conversation with your date, it eventually becomes impossible.  So what do you do?  You and your date go into another room.

Well computer networks are very similar.  The more computers you have on your ethernet segment the noisy it becomes, more packets begin to collide with each other, and performance of your network is decreased.

In this video article we review what a collision domain is, how to manage them, and what devices we can use to segment our collision domains.