Professor Messer's CompTIA 220-1201 A+ Study Group - October 2026

Let's go back to that question we asked earlier, which was, "A network technician is tasked with connecting two departments which reside on different IP subnets within a large corporate office.

Which of the following would be the best choice for connecting these networks?" Would it be a proxy, a router, an access point, an ONT, or a switch? Well, let's see what you chose.

We are going to close our poll.

And we did pretty well on this one.

You can see that fifty-two percent say router, but there's a pretty strong number competing with that one.

Thirty-six percent of you said a switch.

And then we have very small numbers, single digits, five percent for proxy, and then a tie for last place with three percent for an access point and three percent for an optical network terminal or ONT.

So that's one that I think if you're, if you're struggling with trying to figure out how to separate IP subnets, then we should probably go with what the fifty-two percent of you chose, which was indeed a router.

A router is the device that we needed to connect different IP subnets.

A router makes its forwarding decisions based on the destination IP address inside of a packet.

Sometimes you'll see these combined with a switch, but what you really often see, we see-- call these things layer three switches, really is a switch that happened to have a router inside of it.

They are still separate entities within that device.

It's the same thing as having two separate devices, a switch and a router.

You just sort of combined it within the same power supply, if you wanna think of it that way.

Also, this, these routers allow you to connect a lot of different types of networks.

So if you're connecting up a copper network to a fiber network, and these are different IP subnets, your router can perform that translation as well.

Uh, if you're doing anything that deals with, uh, connecting IP subnets, a router is the answer that you should be looking for.

And indeed, the router was the answer we wanted here as well.

That was the one that defined what this particular question was talking about, which was the IP subnets.

Now, we have other questions here.

For example, uh, thirty-six percent of you, a strong number, said a switch.

If this had said that we are connecting two departments on different broadcast domains, then a switch would have been the right answer.

But in this case, the switch, thirty-six percent of you, unfortunately were, were looking at that layer two MAC address side of things and not considering that we were actually connecting different IP subnets.

It's a different layer of the OSI model.

Uh, but this is one where if you see connecting a broadcast domain, it's a switch.