Imagine a state that people live at the southern side of the state and work at the northern side. At 6am they all have to be to work at 7am for opening. Can you imagine the amount of traffic there would be if there was only one road or highway going from south to north? I’m not sure if that is what Bon Scott was imagining about when AC/DC released the song “Highway to Hell” but I’m sure it could apply. Tons of traffic would exist, no one would get anywhere for hours and it wouldn’t be worth even posting speed limit signs over 25mph.
Network Segmentation addresses this problem that happens in networks all the time and probably happening in your home network now. With consumer devices becoming so popular and even now your coffee pot and fridge can connect to your Wi-Fi for… updates? It’s only a matter of time before the toaster requires a Wi-Fi connection for updates and remote connection capabilities. It actually could be nice if you had a strawberry Pop-Tart, preloaded the night before, and could wake up on a Sunday, lay in bed with the dogs, grab the cell phone and start the toaster with a pot a coffee.
My network is segmented because of the number of devices in the house and the additional potential number of devices there could be. AT&T has given me a gateway that allows me to have multiple networks with different subnets and VLAN’s, I could even use a block of static IP’s and make individual networks per IP address. After segmentation of my network, now, back to the original analogy, instead of one road to get to work, now I have created 5 roads for everyone to take to get to work spread across the state from east to west. Traffic flows smoother now and there is the option to regulate the bandwidth or speed per segmentation. I won’t go back, I love the segmentation!