Packet Switching vs. Circuit Switching
Circuit Switching
- Dedicated circuit
- Manually connect two circuits together
- Guaranteed bandwidth
- Circuit is guaranteed 100% available for whatever you want to do
- Maintained permanently, the actual electronic path
- Circuit maintained permanently
- Service-Level Agreement (SLA)
- A guarantee from a company that says that they are going to deliver that kind of performance of service.
- Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS)
- Only uses two pins (send and receive)
- ISDN
- This is a digital subscriber line, compared to the analogue (manual) subscriber line.
- Analogue to digital conversion
- We can apply some integrity checks, if not we can correct it
- Gave more speeds.
- T1, T3, E1, E3
- These were the styles of circuits used.
- Would be your dedicated circuit between two offices
- Not as practical as Packet Switching.
Packet Switching
- Shared infrastructure
- You won't actually never reach your maximum level of speed.
- Have a big powerful infrastructure but just use a portion of it.
- Use what's available
- Varies based on what other customers are doing
- Multipathing
- Passing traffic over different paths.
- You can put different applications over different paths.
- Traffic engineering
- The process of you working with your service provider to wander what is of importance for you
- Gives us the ability to look at the different flows and send them over different paths.
- Quick provisioning time
- Circuit switching could take like 8 weeks.
- Low cost
- We can't efficiently use everything that we have all the time
- It benefits everyone
- High bandwith
- No SLA
- Outages could exist for a couple days
- You can purchase two broadband connections much cheaper.