For a typical broadband ISP, are nodes on the same subnet routed together or are they bridged?
In other words, what kind of path will a packet take when going from one node on a subnet to another for a typical broadband ISP like COMCAST? Possibilities:
1) nodes are on the same LAN and are hubbed/routed so the NIC on each node sees every packet generated on the subnet
2) nodes are switched; each node sees only its own packets and those from the switch; packets to another node on the same subnet are switched directly to the other node
3) nodes are bridged to some kind of NOC/IDS before they are routed back to the subnet; in this case a packet might go through a bunch of machines before returning to the subnet
I tried doing a tracert to other nodes on my subnet. This was the result:
Tracing route to pool-173-76-15-213.bstnma.fios.verizon.net [173.76.15.201]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 3 ms 4 ms 4 ms L100.BSTNMA-VFTTP-145.verizon-gni.net [71.126.250.1]
2 11 ms 12 ms 12 ms pool-173-76-15-213.bstnma.fios.verizon.net [173.76.15.213]
So, by this test, it seems packets just go to the switch and then directly to the other node (option 2 above).
