shared medium
Shared medium, i.e. a shared transmission medium, is the transmission basis of traditional network technologies such as Ethernet, Token Ring and FDDI. All network stations have access to the transmission medium and share it. The transmission operation of a single station simultaneously blocks all other stations.
In addition to the disadvantage of having to divide the available transmission medium among all active stations, the shared- media topology means that faulty stations can affect the functionality of all other network stations. In addition, all stations have the possibility of accessing data packets that have no addressing for them, which considerably reduces the data security of LANs. Due to these disadvantages, switching systems implement the principle of the non-shared transmission medium.