EtherChannel

EtherChannel technology was originally developed by Cisco as a LAN switch-to-switch technique of grouping several Fast Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet ports into one logical channel

When an EtherChannel is configured, the resulting virtual interface is called a Port Channel

The Physical Interfaces are bundled together into a Port Channel Interface, as shown in the figure

Other Switch vendors have their own version of this technology

Also realize we are working with Layer 2 right now and we will need to revisit these concepts in Layer 3