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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Same. I cannot imagine who buys these things. You have business-class problems like high PoE current on the same wire as > 1GE traffic, but you're buying no-name, no-support whitebox gear? It just doesn't make any sense.

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What kind of support do you think you're going to get with cheap unmanaged switches? We couldn't get meaningful support from one of the big name vendors with their top of the line routers with millions of dollars spent on hardware purchases and support contracts.

You're not really selling the idea of spending more on the big name there. I mean, if the big name is Cisco, then at least the CLI commands come back to my fingers like playing an old piano song, and there's likely to be some documentation from them or a rando's blog, but this is an unmanaged switch - there's nothing to configure.

That said, I'd probably look at TP-Link products; I suppose you could call them the name brand of cheap network gear.

Yep, I got the TP-Link TL-SG1008D recommended by a network guy who works at Eero. $20 for 8 ports, unmanaged, works fine. Not 2.5GbE though, just gigabit.

Ubiquiti for all their faults has a neat 5 port, PoE powered semi-managed switch [0] for 30$ - if you’re looking just at gigabit.

[0] - https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-switching/pro...

Yeah, that was my point :-)

2.5 Gb is becoming the new 1 Gb. 10 Gb networking gear is still often a significant premium over 1 Gb gear but 2.5 Gb is approaching the point where a smart future proofing move would be to avoid buy 1 gig networking gear going forward even if you don’t have a use for more than 1 Gb network speeds right now.

Then it’s a question of why is someone looking for a small, inexpensive PoE switch and PoE cameras are the most likely use I can think of.

They sell a non-PoE version.

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