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In general, a hub is a central node in a network. The term comes from the analogy to a wheel's hub, which is the center of the wheel with spokes radiating out from it.
An airline hub is an airport that serves as the base of operations for that airline, usually where most flights originate from.
A hub is also a computer networking device that connects multiple Ethernet segments together making them act as a single segment. When using a hub, every attached device shares the same broadcast domain and the same collision domain. Therefore, only one computer connected to the hub is able to transmit at a time.
Depending on the network topology, the hub provides a basic level 1 OSI model connection among the network objects (workstations, servers, etc). It provides bandwidth which is shared among all the objects, compared to switches, which provide a dedicated connection between individual nodes.