F inally, bridges tend to glue the network together, rather than partition it into manageable compartments. What this means to network administrators is that the failure of any network element can potentially impact the entire network. Bridging, in effect, increases the number of devices that can disable the network and the area that can be affected. But a comparison between switches and bridges reveals few differences beyond size and the number of ports. Switches are not suited, however, for cable networks for a number of reasons.
Cable networks have far less available bandwidth than campus LANs.
Cable networks also cannot rely on cooperation among a unified organization of users, resulting in the need for a greater level of security to protect against hackers. It's important to note that these issues with bridging networks apply when the size of the network grows large. Bridging networks will probably function reasonably well in the initial stages of service deployment when the number of users is small, but will lead to problems as the user base grows. As mentioned earlier, the data networking industry faced this same issue years ago and, through extensive experience, learned that routing added critical intelligence to a bridging network, which in turn increased reliability, availability and security. In fact, this is the reason that routers are used extensively in all enterprise networks, and that the Internet is built with routers.