Given that hubs are essentially the same as switches, as far as I know, except they share bandwidth between all connected devices, while switches do not, resulting in faster connections. I am simply wondering if there is any reasonable purpose for hubs in modern networks.
Network Hardware – Is There Any Reason to Use a Hub Over a Switch
ethernethardwareNetworkswitchswitching
Best Answer
For the most part, no. Hubs are also known as repeaters - meaning that they basically echo whatever is coming in to a given port out all other ports in the domain. The idea is (or, more properly, was) to replicate the behavior of a shared piece of coaxial cable, meaning that the individual hosts had to assure that only one member of the LAN was transmitting at a given time (...managing this is where the notion of collisions and CSMA/CD comes in).
Switches, in turn, a actually multi-port bridges. Switches learn what hardware addresses are on what ports and then (ideally) only transmit traffic to the host(s) on a particular port.
As a really crude example, imagine 4 hosts on a network: A, B, C and D. On a hub a conversation between A and B is seen, in full, by C and D. As such, if there's a second conversation between C and D it is now sharing the same bandwidth with the traffic being sent back and forth between A and B. In contrast, on a switch these conversations are kept entirely separate - thus allowing both sets of hosts to communicate at full speed without effecting one another. This (among other behaviors) massively improves overall scalability and performance on most networks.
The other issue here is that as Ethernet speeds have gotten faster the basic mechanisms mentioned above (collision detection) have actually disappeared. In 10 and 100 megabit there were absolutely modes for half-duplex (i.e. single host transmitting at a time) communication while in gigabit it was largely deprecated/unimplemented (there were some 10/100 hubs that bridged to FDX gigabit connections but very few - if any - gigabit hubs) and in 10 gigabit (and beyond) it's nonexistent (...meaning a switch is now the only option).
So is there a reasonable purpose for a hub nowadays? I'd say generally not. Some gigantic portion of modern equipment doesn't even support half-duplex at this point, and 100M is becoming fairly uncommon in its own right. There used to be an argument for hubs as a good way to easily monitor traffic without the use of SPAN ports or taps, but that was a fairly uncommon use-case even 15 years ago.