Comment by bogomipz
10 years ago
I am not understanding the point you are trying to make.
OSI is just a model and it is not limited to end stations. What gives you that impression?
Conceptually and virtually switches most certainly do exist in the OSI model.
For all practical purposes a switch can be thought of as a multiport bridge. And as such it exists at Layer 1 and Layer 2.
> OSI is just a model and it is not limited to end stations. What gives you that impression?
I didn't say anything about end stations? The point is that a switch is inherently a violation of OSI layering (it uses layer-3 information to make layer-2 decisions), which given that practically all modern networks are switched, suggests that the 7-layer model may not be that useful for modelling real-world networks.