Hubs

A hub is a device for connecting multiple Ethernet devices together and making them act as a single network segment. Two common types of hubs are passive and active. A passive hub simply receives data transmitted from a device to one port and broadcasts it out to the devices connected on all other ports. An active hub performs the same receive then broadcast action as a passive hub and also, regenerates or boosts the signal much like a repeater. Hubs are generally inexpensive and easy to manege; however, they have a high degree of contention due to all ports being in the same contention domain and therefore do not provide the best performance in high-traffic or latency-sentitive situations