The location of hubs and how they interconnect are important considerations, and control over these factors is necessary in order to achieve the best overall resource utilization and network stability. Features such as network address collection, operational statistics, and dynamic service provisioning are very beneficial when dealing with thousands of connections. This allows an unscrupulous user to steal user ids, passwords, and other related information. To prevent this many hubs include features which render data from other users unreadable, and thus provides security to all. Once a network connection is installed the real work of keeping it going begins.
People make mistakes, and equipment does fail.
Dealing with these realities requires good network management tools. It is crucial for network equipment, especially hubs, to provide a full compliment of standards based management information dynamically accessible by common tools. This enables us to monitor network health and traffic, as well as gather important information related to problem resolution. Futures Network technology is changing fast, primarily driven by increasing numbers of users demanding more resources with new applications. It is only a matter of time until a given workstation needs greater network capacity.