Buy Netgear Prosafe 24Port 10/100 Smart Switch with 4 X GIG Ports and Full POENetgear Prosafe 24Port 10/100 Smart Switch with 4 X GIG Ports and Full POE Product Description:
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Flexible PoE Layer 2 Switch
By G. Howell
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.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent product
By PeterJ
Netgear are well known in the Ethernet market and this product doesn't disappoint. It is well made, simple to use right out of the box and at a very good price through Amazon. The cooling fan is quite noisy so it wouldn't be too good for a quiet environment.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Netgear Prosafe FS728TP POE smart ethernet switch
By Ferg45
I recently purchased my second Netgear Prosafe FS728TP. I was intending to make much more use of its POE functionality, I wanted to monitor the various POE devices around the site and aspired to turn some of the them on/off automatically to save power at night. However, I am sending the FS728TP back, the latest version can not be configured at all using any Mac based browser, it is also very slow and clumsy. This device is years old but in many respects it is still alpha quality.My previous purchase was two years ago. That device was configured and left in place and appears to be running fine. The once a year I did log into its web interface for admin purposes was an utter pain. The first version of the software had lots of images that would not render, panels and form fields were off the edge of the screen. The generally excellent Netgear tech support pointed out the firmware was old and I should upgrade to version 3.0.0.22. I did this and all-and-all I still regret doing so. Javascript error message dialogues often appear after clicking the apply button. The overall GUI design is a considerable leap backwards compared to the first version with little though given to work flows. Finally given the admin screens are so inefficiently organised, it is especially annoying that it is so much slower than the pervious release.The new unit arrived and appeared identical to the previous version except that it's firmware was now at 5.0.0.7. I returned it a few days later as I could not get Firefox on my Mac to to perform any administration functions past the login screen. A second unit arrived and displayed the same symptoms. Netgear support eventually confirmed a firmware bug. Retrying the admin functions again from IE6 the same very clumsy and slow GUI was still there. I had a lot of bother using D-http://amazon.co.uk/dp/B000NDT61I/?tag={bouquinfrance-21} DWL P50 POE adapters, the FS728TP switch said it was supply power yet the adapters LED was off. Toggling POE on the port generally got things working. However the umpteen steps required to toggle a POE port on/off was a bit of joke. It also became clear that the overly complicated admin web site would preclude any web based automation of its functions.Lastly it is so noisy that folk in the adjoining room were inquiring what the noise was.
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