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stephen_gtoday at 6:47 AM0 repliesview on HN

> You will have a switch at home (perhaps in your router) with more than two ports on it. At layer 1 or 2 how do you mediate your traffic, without CSMA? Take a single switch with n ports on it, where n>2. How do you mediate ethernet traffic without CSMA - its how the actual electrical signals are mediated?

CSMA/CD is specifically for a shared medium (shared collision domain in Ethernet terminology), putting a switch in it makes every port its own collision domain that are (in practice these days) always point-to-point. Especially for gigabit Ethernet, there was some info in the spec allowing for half-duplex operation with hubs but it was basically abandoned.

As others have said, different mechanisms are used to manage trying to send more data than a switch port can handle but not CSMA (because it's not doing any of it using Carrier Sense, and it's technically not Multiple Access on the individual segment, so CSMA isn't the mechanism being used).

> That's full duplex as opposed to half duplex.

No actually they're talking about something more complex, 100Mbps Ethernet had full duplex with separate transmit and receive pairs, but with 1000Base-T (and 10GBase-T etc.) the four pairs all simultaneously transmit and receive 250 Mbps (to add up to 1Gbps in each direction). Not that it's really relevant to the discussion but it is really cool and much more interesting than just being full duplex.