Would a managed POE switch be useful?

Firegod

Firegod

Firegod

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Joined
12 Sep 2003
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Location
Newcastle, UK
I need advice from more knowledgeable folk. :D

My external router NR7101 uses one of those POE injectors at the moment. That then goes into the XT12 mesh wifi units.

I was just perusing the Ubiquity wifiman app and noticed the throughput section, saying how it can integrate into unify for more insights. It got me thinking... if I had a managed switch, would it give me any cool info and insights into my network? Whilst also removing the POE injector.

I'm a sucker for graphs and usage info. Zyxel and Ubiquity stuff looks interesting. But is it just a waste of money or can it offer useful and actionable results? I'd only need a small managed switch. 5 or 8 ports I guess it would have to be. Noticed ubiquity don't do a UK plug?

Any advice? Not needed? Or a useful little bit of kit to have? I know the XT12 can do packet analysis and all that good stuff but it adds overhead and sometimes instability. I wondered if doing it at the switch level would alleviate that. I also have a weird issue where if the NR7101 is rebooted, sometimes the XT12 won't get a WAN IP. I'll have to reboot everything and make sure the NR7101 comes up first. I was thinking would the switch help fix that glitch. It did this with my old Orbi kit so it must be the NR7101 to blame.

Cheers.
 
It's Ubiquiti, no y. And no, a managed switch won't give you what you're after.

If what you have works and you only have that one issue, put up with it and save some money.
 
I have a managed POE switch (Cisco CBS350-8MGP-2X). It will show statistics, including charting power usage over time. This is... not at all useful, because what can I do with that information? It would be useful on a large network where you might not know what's connected to each port, but not for a home network.
 
VLANs and stuff aside the only thing I've found a managed switch to be useful for on a smaller network is the ability to granularly throttle individual ports - sometimes it is the only way to prevent users from killing an internet connection with heavy use of torrents (for some reason it works) - where other QoS fails. Even on hardware which should stand up to the kind of connection cycling, etc. torrents can produce on the network.

Not quite sure why it works but I'm guessing the way the switch manages bandwidth naturally produces a bottleneck to the connection cycling ahead of the router.
 
Thanks all. Saved me a bit of money which is always useful. I was hoping they could maybes give more info than that, throuhput, devices, trafflic graphs and fancy pie charts and perhaps performance metrics, uptime, anything geeky basically lol. :)
 
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