Think of a network like a neighborhood and VLANs as the houses in the neighborhood. If you have no VLANs it's like having everyone in that neighborhood living in one giant house, or a sports stadium. There is no real privacy, your family can see and be seen at all times by all of the other families.This house would also be very loud with everyone trying to talk over one another all of the time.   Now if we add VLANs to this 'network', every family gets their own house but cannot leave it. These houses are like our VLANs; each family inside a house can talk to their family members very easily and see what their family is up to but they cannot leave their house. Now that each family has their own house, they no longer need to compete with as many other people's voices when trying to talk to other family members. Now lets say the only way to talk to people in another house is with a phone call and the HOA is able to control who can and cannot call who. This allows us to control communication to/from any of these houses so that no one can talk to anyone or everyone can talk to anyone, or something in the middle with some houses being able to talk to some but not all.   Would you rather live in a stadium with thousands of other people, no privacy and always having to shout, or would you prefer your own quiet house? ... View more