PROSAFE 24PT SMART SWITCH 10/100 W/ 4PT GIGABIT 24PT POE

See it at Amazon.co.uk for £312.42

Average Customer Rating
(5.0 out of 5)

Amazon Customer Reviews

Most Helpful First | Newest First

---

Excellent

We have one of these units on our network to provide power to Axis WebCams and VoIP phones.
Installation was a breeze and configuration was straightforward, although it worked out the box for us.
It shares a common interface with the rest of the Netgear range, so nothing new to learn.

Unlike a lot of the POE hubs & switches around this unit provides power on all 24 ports not just some.
But you'll need to watch the loading, our phones seem to use twice the power when booting than when they are running.

Once we have more POE devices, we'll be looking at the Netgear range again

---

Flexible PoE Layer 2 Switch

We recently needed to source a good quality Power over Ethernet (PoE) device to power a few access points (APs) when we setup a wireless ISP in our local village. The problem was that we needed to position the APs as close to the antennas as possible to reduce signal loss, but this meant there was no mains power anywhere close. We had to run the ethernet cables anyway so we combined the power using PoE; so no need to run mains, bonus.

We decided on the Netgear FS728TP switch because the 24 fast ethernet ports could be used to both power the APs and to replace an ageing ethernet hub. We had not used PoE before but we found configuration really easy (in fact, you just plug in the PoE cable, connect to the PoE APs and thats it, it just detects power is needed and the APs gets the juice they need. If you make a mistake and plug a non PoE device in, no problem, it just behaves like a normal ethernet port connect).

The switch is a layer 2 switch which provides very fast packet transfer between ports using an intelligent hardware chip that looks at the MAC addresses of packets and decides where they should go, so the switch does not get overloaded with traffic like the old hub where packets are passed to all of the ports.

But there is more. The FS728TP also supports VLANS (a way of separating traffic into 'private' network zones), so we used the built-in web interface to place the ports connected to the wireless APs into a private VLAN and configured another ethernet port to belong to the same private VLAN then connected that directly to the ISP router, so we were able to keep the village traffic isolated from our internal ethernet network (much more secure).

We found the web interface easy to use and it was easy to configure the VLANS and also to monitor the traffic levels on each port (very useful for seeing how busy the wireless APs were). We also made use of the built-in monitoring facility which allows you to 'snoop' on certain ports (the wireless ones in our case) using a packet sniffer like Wireshark to prove that certain traffic was coming from the wireless network. Very useful debugging.

The FS728TP has many other features that we haven't used yet, like gigabit uplinks to other switches, port trunking and quality of service (actually, we're going to use this on the wireless ports) so we feel this has been a great investment that will allow our network to grow as needed. Nice one Netgear.

---