These physical wiring standards operate at 10 Mbps:

1. 10Base2
2. 10Base5
3. 10BaseT

In Ethernet segments, devices connect to the same physical medium. Because of this, all devices receive all signals sent across the wire. If two devices send a packet at the same time, a collision occurs. In the event of a collision, the two devices run a backoff algorithm and resend the packet. The devices retransmit up to 15 times. The first station to detect a collision issues a jam signal. When a jam signal is sent from a workstation, it affects all of the machines on the segment, not just the two that collided; when the jam signal is on the wire, no workstations can transmit data. The more collisions that occur in a network, the slower it will be, because the devices will have to resend the packet. A collision domain defines a group of devices connected to the same physical medium.

A broadcast domain defines a group of devices that receive each others' broadcast messages. As with collisions, the more broadcasts that occur on the network, the slower your network will be. This is because every device that receives a broadcast must process it to see if the broadcast is intended for it.

Switches and bridges are used to break up collision domains. They create more collision domains and fewer collisions. Routers are used to break up broadcast domains. They create more broadcast domains and smaller broadcast areas.

Each layer of the OSI model can communicate only with the layer above it, below it, and parallel to it (a peer layer). For example, the presentation layer can communicate with only the application layer, session layer, and presentation layer on the machine it is communicating with. These layers communicate with each other using protocol data units (PDUs). These PDUs control information that is added to the user data at each layer of the model. This information resides in fields called headers (the front of the data field) and trailers (the end of the data field).