Simplex – In this mode of communication, data is sent only in one direction and device at the receiving end will only receive the data. Role of the sender and receiver cannot be changed in this mode of connection.
Example of Simplex – TV is an example of simplex communication, it only receives data and no data is sent back to the opposite direction.
Half duplex – On this mode switch can only receive or sent at the same time hence half duplex is slow connection and prevent full duplex switch to work with full potential. On the other hand, hubs do not have full duplex functionality so they can only receive or send data at once.
Example of half duplex – Radio is an example of half duplex in which data is sent by one device and received by the other.
Full duplex – full duplex functionality allow switch to transfer and receive data at the same time which makes the bandwidth double so it is very important that we must check the devices for duplex mismatch because duplex mismatch causes collision and when collision takes place then the data is lost so device has to send the data again which further reduces the speed of the network.
Example of full duplex – Telephone is an example of full duplex communication as data can be sent and received at the same time.
Even though the Cisco auto-negotiation for duplex selection works perfectly most of the times, however in some instances, a Cisco device is unable to detect the duplex mode and it may result in a duplex mismatch. This could results in collisions in the network. Therefore, to fully utilize the bandwidth and the capacity of the switch, it is a good practice to hard-code the speed and duplex on the Cisco devices.
In this lab, we will configure the speed to 100 Mbps and the duplex mode to full. Duplex mode should be configured on both the switches. Now, to configure the duplex and speed, we will have to go into the specific interface on which we want to hard-code the duplex setting.
After configuring the both switch with full duplex, we can solve the issue that occasionally occur due to auto negotiate settings in the switches and if there is 100mb connection between two switches then full duplex allow switches to work with double speed.
Please note that full duplex configuration must be configured on each interface on which we want to hardcode the full duplex mode.
Lab Tasks
- Hard-code interface fastethernet 0/1 to both switches to full duplex.
- Hard-code Speed to 100 Mbps.
Lab Configuration
Task 1
Switch(config)#interface fastethernet 0/1
Switch(config)#duplex full
Task 2
Switch(config)#interface fastethernet 0/1
Switch(config)#speed 100
