Routing-Bridging speed issue.

[CaptHarrased]

Can anyone give me a definitive explanation for bridging being faster than routing. As far as i am concerned this is the case but i have a client that has been told by British Telecom that to speed their x21 link up (1600's either end bridging) the routers should be switched from bridging to routing. As far as i know this is complete crap. Anyone know different and if so why?

 

[routerman]

Well if you will use BT!!

The speed of the X21 link is fixed by the provider’s equipment, it provides a clock at a pre-determined rate which is a multiple of 64k Bits per second.

As for bridging versus routing, originally back in the black and white days of networking a bridge should perform better than a router as there was less CPU processing involved in forwarding the packet.

However as technology has moved on there are new switching methods available, which make the performance difference negligible. Think of bridging, now called switching in a LAN environment, and L3 switching which is hardware based routing.

Even a lowly 1600 can fully utilise a 2meg X21 circuit, so what are they on about?

 

[CaptHarrased]

Ok so if you were asked to configure the routers for speed only no other considerations would you pick bridging or routing?

 

[routerman]

I would go for routing, as this method stops broadcasts from being forwarded across the WA. This frees up bandwidth and therefore should improve speed.