The Sercos Real-Time Ethernet system provides deterministic jitter-free data transmission for controlling and synchronizing drives. Parallel to this and based on a time-slot basis, standard Ethernet telegrams can be transmitted via a NRT (Non-Real-Time) channel. These NRT telegrams must be buffered for retransmission on a standard Ethernet network. The netSWITCH provides this buffer connection between the synchronized Serocs network and standard Ethernet. Besides the two Ethernet ports for Serocs is one Ethernet port for connection to a notebook or other standard Ethernet capable devices.