What are the STP ports stable states?
Sophia Hammond
Updated on May 07, 2026
What are the STP ports stable states?
Spanning Tree Port States, Blocking, Listening, Learning, Forwarding, Disabled. The ports on a switch with enabled Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) are in one of the following five port states. A switch does not enter any of these port states immediately except the blocking state.
What state is the root port on a switch when in STP operation?
Spanning Tree Protocol, Rapid STP Port Costs – Port States
| Port Description | STP State |
|---|---|
| All ports on root switch | Forwarding |
| Root ports on non – root switches | Forwarding |
| Every LAN’s designation port | Forwarding |
| All other working ports | Blocking |
How does STP determine port selection?
STP Root Port Selection
- Lowest bridge ID (Priority:MAC Address) switch becomes the Root-Bridge.
- Each non-root bridge should have ONE root port (RP) which is the port having lowest path-cost to Root Bridge.
- All ports in Root Bridge become Designated Ports (DP)
- Each segment should have one Designated Port (DP)
How does STP decide which port to block?
Designated ports are selected on a per-segment basis, based on the cost of each port on either side of the segment and the total cost calculated by STP for that port to get back to the root bridge. If one end of a segment is a root port, then the other end is a designated port.
What are the STP port roles?
Those roles include root, designated, alternate, backup, and disabled. Root and designated are still the roles that reach the state of forwarding. The role of Desg and Root port is forwarding traffic. The role of Alt is to block the traffic.
What is the name of the new RSTP port state that replaces the STP disabled and blocking states?
discarding state
RSTP uses the discarding state to replace the disabled, blocking, and listening states in STP. Table 18 shows the differences between the port states in RSTP and STP.
What are the port states in STP and RSTP?
RSTP can be described by three port states: Discarding, Learning, and Forwarding. The Disabled, Blocking, and Listening states described by STP have been combined into the Discarding state in RSTP. The functionality is similar.
How does STP determine priority?
To verify the bridge priority of a switch, use the show spanning-tree command. In Example 3-4, the priority of the switch has been set to 24,576. Also notice that the switch is designated as the root bridge for the spanning-tree instance.
What is STP edged port?
A port directly connecting to a user terminal rather than another device or a shared LAN segment can be configured as an edge port. In case the network topology changes, an edge port does not cause a temporary loop. You can enable the port to transit to the forwarding state rapidly by configuring it as an edge port.
Which port is in blocking state?
Switch port enters the blocking state at time of election process, when a switch receives a BPDU on a port that indicates a better path to the Root Switch or if a port is not a Root Port. Port discards the frames received from attached network segments or switched from another port for forwarding.
How do I decide which port to use?
8 Answers
- Look at the IANA list and pick a port that’s not in use.
- Pick a port number that is easy to remember.
- Don’t fix the port number in your code.
- There is an argument that you don’t want to pick something too high as you may conflict with the range used for ephemeral ports.
What are the STP modes?
STP Modes
- Classic STP—Provides a single path between any two end stations, avoiding and eliminating loops.
- Rapid STP (RSTP)—Detects network topologies to provide faster convergence of the spanning tree.
- Multiple STP (MSTP)—MSTP is based on RSTP.