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220-1201 Practice Question: A small office with 15 employees uses a single…
A small office with 15 employees uses a single switch to connect all workstations. Users report that the network becomes extremely slow during peak hours, and some packets are being dropped. The switch is a 10/100 model with a 1 Gbps uplink to the router. What is the most likely cause of the slowdown?
⚠ Common exam trap
The 220-1201 exam often tests the misconception that a slow network during peak hours is always due to a lack of QoS or a faulty uplink, rather than the simple bandwidth limitation of 100 Mbps ports being saturated by multiple users.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
The switch's ports are only 100 Mbps, causing a bottleneck when multiple users are active.
The switch operates at 10/100 Mbps per port, meaning each workstation is limited to a maximum of 100 Mbps. With 15 employees active during peak hours, the aggregate traffic can easily exceed the 100 Mbps per-port capacity, causing congestion, packet drops, and slowdowns. The 1 Gbps uplink to the router is not the bottleneck; the bottleneck is the 100 Mbps access ports connecting the workstations.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The switch is not a managed switch and cannot prioritize traffic.
Why it's wrong here
While a managed switch offers Quality of Service (QoS) features to prioritize certain traffic types, the core problem described is a general slowdown for multiple users, not specific application performance. An unmanaged switch provides basic connectivity and full port speed for connected devices. The absence of traffic prioritization does not inherently cause a network bottleneck if the underlying physical port speeds are adequate for the aggregate traffic volume.
- ✓
The switch's ports are only 100 Mbps, causing a bottleneck when multiple users are active.
Why this is correct
A switch with 100 Mbps (Fast Ethernet) ports limits the maximum data transfer rate for each connected device to 100 megabits per second. With 15 active users simultaneously accessing network resources, the aggregate demand can easily exceed the capacity of individual 100 Mbps links, especially if multiple users are transferring large files or streaming data. This saturation creates a significant bottleneck, leading to noticeable slowdowns, increased latency, and potential packet loss as the switch struggles to process the overwhelming traffic volume.
- ✗
The router's uplink port is faulty and needs to be replaced.
Why it's wrong here
A faulty router uplink port would typically manifest as a complete loss of connectivity to the internet or other network segments, or highly intermittent disconnections, rather than a general network slowdown affecting internal traffic. Furthermore, a 1 Gbps uplink, common in modern routers, provides ample bandwidth for 15 users for typical office tasks, as the aggregate demand rarely saturates a full gigabit connection unless extremely high-bandwidth applications are constantly in use.
- ✗
The switch is a hub, not a switch, causing collisions.
Why it's wrong here
The question explicitly states the device is a switch, which operates at Layer 2 of the OSI model and uses MAC address tables to forward frames only to the intended destination port. This intelligent forwarding creates separate collision domains for each port, effectively eliminating collisions. In contrast, a hub is a Layer 1 device that simply broadcasts all incoming data to every other port, creating a single collision domain and leading to frequent data collisions and significant performance degradation, which is not characteristic of a functioning switch.
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TCP/IP and Common Ports for A+
Key term
Switch
A switch is a networking device that connects devices on a local area network and uses MAC addresses to forward data only to the intended recipient.
Key term
CAN
A CAN (Controller Area Network) is a robust vehicle bus standard designed to allow microcontrollers and devices to communicate with each other without a host computer.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This 220-1201 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the 220-1201 exam.