Network Skills / CCNA 200-301 Tutorials / TCP vs UDP Tutorial for CCNA

TCP vs UDP Tutorial for CCNA

9 min read

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) are the two main protocols at the Transport layer. Both aim to deliver data between applications, but they take very different approaches to reliability and speed.

TCP is connection-oriented and reliable; UDP is connectionless and fast
TCP trades speed for reliability; UDP trades reliability for speed.

In short:

  • TCP is slower, but reliable.
  • UDP is faster, but makes no reliability guarantees.
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