NETGEAR Switches Reviews

We use Netgear switches in a flat network. All the computers are plugged into the same switch. We also have some Power over Ethernet switches from Netgear.

Netgear switches are highly reliable. We haven't done anything particularly sophisticated with them.

Netgear switches could be cheaper. 

I have used Netgear switches for about five years. 

I rate Netgear switches 10 out of 10 for reliability. 

I used different vendors in the past, including 3com and HP. 

Setting up a Netgear switch was incredibly straightforward in our case because we aren't doing anything complicated. We rack everything and plug it in. It can be done in minutes.

I rate Netgear switches nine out of 10. 

As an engineering company who pioneered network-based AV solutions, we strongly rely on our in-house network backbone. It is fundamental for all required AV protocols, as well as for all of the standard network purposes which our company uses.

In our case, SDVoE, Dante (professional audio), office traffic, etc. flow on different VLANs which are incorporated into one single physical network infrastructure. Divided over two racks, three switches from the 4300 series are running in stacked mode and provide 10GbE connections to the SDVoE encoders and decoders from ZeeVee, as well as to all our other gear, including Dante devices, computers, access points, and phones.

With the NETGEAR 4300 series switches, we have been able to test, demonstrate, and provide training on the ZeeVee 10GbE SDVoE gear, which we distribute.

Thanks to the availability of 10GbE, we have been able to show the difference between compressed 4K video streaming over 1GbE and uncompressed 4K video streaming with the use of the SDVoE protocol and 10GbE.

However, 10GbE is Ethernet in another speed. We had to learn how to handle it. This knowledge will be useful in future projects. For example, one of our upcoming projects will have 24 encoders and 11 decoders with two M4300-96X NETGEAR switches.

• The stacking feature
• The web interface, which makes it easy to use and set up.
• The support for SDVoE
• The 10GbE port speed

It provides the ability to stack switches together, and this is a huge time saver! Having one interface to configure the complete system, especially when it comes to VLANs, helps a lot. This administration is something that is time consuming when all switches need to be configured individually. Thanks to stacking, you have VLANs available on all switches, and you can just select what you want.

Since it has a web interface, it is easy to set up. You don't have to take three years of training somewhere for a lot of money.

NETGEAR's web interface describes settings with names and sentences which are different from other switch manufacturers. Therefore, you must figure out what each one does before you can use it. If you compare it to Cisco, for example, their web interface is a bit more intuitive.

The web interface could also be improved when it comes to multicast settings. Especially, that IGMP is spread to “Switching” and “Routing“ is confusing. At first, it is unclear what needs to be setup where.

Support for IGMPv3 querier would be appreciated. Currently, only a version 2 querier can be sent by the switches, which is a bit outdated, since version 3 has been on the market for a few years now. Cisco does support querier version 3 in their small business switches.

The ‘how-to’ guides could do with some improvements. We got in trouble following the stacking and Dante set-up guides. If these would have been accurate, we would not have lost three days.

We have been using this solution for three years now.

It has been very stable, since the initial stacking issues were solved. It simply runs, which is the best. You can plug it in, set it up, and you can forget about it. Surely, there will be maintenance tasks in the future, like firmware upgrades, which can be done in-house.

You can combine up to eight units in a stack. For its price, it scales well. To get optimum performance for SDVoE, the uplink bandwidth between the switches needs to be designed carefully. We haven't seen any type of switch-related bottleneck issues, so far.

Our issues are immediately escalated to Tier 3 support, which has been very good. However, there are some issues that have not yet been resolved.

We were using and selling the Cisco Small Business 300 and 500 Series. But, a lot of different new firmware was being released for these switches, and with every firmware update came a different problem. The last thing you want is to have is a switch which behaves strange in your backbone, or on a project site. We just got fed up with it.

Seeing this, and the fact that Cisco does not have 10GbE hardware for a reasonable price, convinced us to switch to NETGEAR. Thanks to the increase in bandwidth, we were finally able to truly demonstrate the 10GbE solutions that we distribute.

Other than that, the change from Cisco to NETGEAR has not changed anything in our organization. Day-to-day things didn't change a lot and our office runs as always.

At first, we stacked all switches together, then we started to configure the different VLANs. Just when we wanted to swap over to production, we recognized that there was a problem with the stacking configuration that we did.

The priorities of the switches must be set in a different way than we had assumed, so backup units can overtake management in case the main unit is down. If you don't set them properly, you somehow get the effect of the management switch changing from one to the other switch frequently.

Once this was resolved, we could switch over on the fly to production without any visible downtime and work normally.

Deploying Dante devices was also a bit problematic, since the stacked mode ‘how-to’ guides for Dante are not quite accurate, e.g., the setup of QoS resulted in a support case.

After configuring the VLAN (according to the manufacturer’s manual), we just plug in the SDVoE gear. This worked.

We implemented the 4300 series at the end of January. Altogether, our deployment took four days. Three days were lost on implementing Dante due to the weak ‘how-to’ guides.

We did the deployment ourselves. There is no need to be an IT expert if you are deploying standalone. The web interface is common and easy to understand. You just need to know how to set up a switch. Only when it comes to the stacked mode, then you need to have IT knowledge. The rest of our team had no noticeable breaks during the transition.

We have saved time since we switched from Cisco to NETGEAR. With Cisco, firmware updates and troubleshooting afterwards were costing us hours. With NETGEAR, we update, and it all works as before.

The pricing is very good for 10GbE switches and you get a lot of throughput. It is about 60 percent of the costs of other switches from competitive manufacturers, which is really good.

Since we were looking to go to 10GbE, our choices were either Cisco or NETGEAR. 

Ubiquiti wasn't a consideration. When I have worked with them in the past, there have been many issues. Therefore, I would not consider using them as reliable backbone.

To have unlimited, uncompressed, 4K transmission, you cannot go with 1GbE, you need 10GbE. The 4300 Series is the way to go. 

We run two different High-Bandwidth AV over IP systems simultaneously and haven't seen any limitations yet.

NETGEAR Switches is great because it comes preconfigured and designed specifically for AV and that suits our needs. NETGEAR offers multiple port options, is simple to configure, easy to handle, reliable and stable. The most valuable feature for us is the reasonable price. 

I expect we’ll continue to see an improvement in the configuration which could be simplified further. I would also like to see switches with more ports that provide room for new protocols of communications. It would be great to have more bandwidth.

Our primary use case of Switches is for work with a data protocol for audio or AVB protocol for audio. We also use the AVoIP, Dante, and Control.

NETGEAR is a preferred partner for our company which has offices nationwide and offshore. I work as a project engineer for an audio video integrator company.

The solution is stable and scalable. You can link multiple switches and create a bigger network.

We recently used Araknis and sometimes also use Cisco or Extreme Networks. Araknis is about the same price or even cheaper than NETGEAR, but they do not offer as many options as NETGEAR.

Licensing cost depends on the model and number of ports, whether it’s POE, POE Plus or POE Plus Plus. There are certain Cisco switches that are about the same price. 

AVB licensing is required to purchase separately on NETGEAR and Extreme Network.

I rate this product nine out of 10. 

We sell NETGEAR Switches. We are exclusive distributors.

NETGEAR switches are used in office networks, Wi-Fi networks, and internal networks.

We have a wide range of switches for various applications, including a collection specifically designed for ProAV, as well as Multi-gig Switches, which are also quite well-known or unique.

I believe the pricing, support, and customization are all reasonable.

It is easy to use.

Perhaps in the future, we will have even more different types of switches and be able to fulfill more collections.

Most of our clients request VLAN functions and possibly other advanced controlling functions. I mean now netgear has it's fabulous Insight Management function, and I am happy to see it keep updating the cloud service features to even better and even more user friendly control.   

I've been working with NETGEAR switches since I started working for this company a few years ago.

We sell all of the available switches.

Most of the time NETGEAR Switches are high performance and quite stable.

NETGEAR Switches are scalable because we have different collections to fulfill different scenarios.

Technical support is reasonable.

We also have PLANET Switch.

It is my understanding that the initial setup is easy.

I believe that the pricing is reasonable.

I would rate NETGEAR Switches a nine out of ten.

We use them for AV-over-IP, meaning devices that transport multimedia bits and packages across the network. We use about 5,000 switches a year and we use them all over the place. We'll use them on a video wall. We don't use a matrix router anymore. We'll run and operate AV through switches for distribution.

We're using the ProSAFE and we're using the M4300's and the M4500's.

We're seeing a 35 to 40 percent cost drop and, so far, we don't have any returns or any RMAs. No flaws.

The High Bandwidth AV-over-IP functionality of these switches has been fantastic, especially in leaf-and-spine. We've been able to build redundancy and they seem to outperform even the Cisco Catalyst, which is about twice as expensive as the M-series switches are.

The price-to-performance for the M4300s is phenomenal. It's the best-on-market.

We also like the ease of set up. The setup on them takes less than 15 minutes. They're fantastic. On a scale of one to five, the ease of use is a five.

The warranty rates a four or five out of five. It's a good warranty. We don't have any problems with the product, so we don't think about it.

It looks like they're going to come up with an auto-config, so if it's a slightly different switch, when you plug them together they will auto-recognize each other.

Also, if they could come up with ways to look at metrics on it while the video is capping through the system, that would be nice. There could be some interesting uses for that, but it's a long way off.

We started transitioning to NETGEAR Switches seriously about seven months ago. It's gone really well. We're very limited in what we'll recommend and choose for our clients to build their systems with.

We haven't had one failure.

Scalability? Love it. It was very cleverly designed in terms of the output ports and being able to plug it into a 10 Gb and be able to leaf-and-spine a system. I have not run out of capacity for any of the stuff I've been building.

When customers want to add on to their systems, to add on a switch, we can definitely add one on because the system is expandable.

We've used technical support a couple of times and they're very helpful to our guys in getting things set up.

Our customers primarily switch from Cisco to NETGEAR. It's just a better switch for the same cost for small business: the 350s and 550s. I would even say that NETGEAR can now outperform a Catalyst on an AV transport.

It's very straightforward to set them up. You put them into a system and you connect all your devices to them. Every system has a switch.

You don't need to be an IT expert to deploy and support your networks. We're plugging in devices on pre-configured switches. The switches are pre-configured to work within the environment that we're putting them in. Because of the low maintenance in setup, it's really easy to send our technician-level out for installation. As a matter of fact, we can install most of the items directly out-of-box, without even setting them up.

For deployment and maintenance we require one person per job, usually a technician.

The pricing is great. The cost of the hardware is low. I think it would be bad for NETGEAR to start going down the road of a licensing model. We want a one-time, upfront cost.

They're not the lowest cost. There are a few solutions that have a lower cost, but NETGEAR is very value-oriented. If you're not considering NETGEAR switches, you're throwing money out the window right now. There's nothing on the market like it.

I'm familiar with many other solutions: Extreme, Luxul, Cisco, Aruba, and Dell, and none of them even come close to NETGEAR.

The others don't have IGMP Plus, that's exclusive in NETGEAR. And balancing PIM nodes and all that other stuff on a large network is a pain. It doesn't work that well. NETGEAR even has functions that the other switches just don't have.

With IGMP the querier is not necessarily equal on all switches. And the amount of buffer that NETGEAR has feels like it could take on twice the amount of the bandwidth that we're placing on it. It just feels like the NETGEAR switch was made to do AV multicasting, instead of trying to fit AV multicasting on a network switch. It feels like it was designed the other way around.

We're an audio-visual systems integrator so our main use case is supporting AV systems. The main reason we're focusing on NETGEAR is for AV over IP solutions.

The environment that it's deployed in depends on the system or the solution that the customer is looking for. It could be as simple as just a single switch that has multiple hosts attached to it, or it could be a more complex system that has multiple rooms where all of the room switches would connect back to a central core switch.

We use NETGEAR for our customers' solutions. We don't have it deployed internally yet so there aren't actually that many people in our company who are using it on a day-to-day basis. They just configure it and get it set up and installed at the customer's site.

The out-of-the-box IGMP functionality has improved our organization because it is such a time-saver for our technicians. It means they don't have to worry about the extra setup that most other manufacturers require on their switches. They're able to just power them on and to plug in and start configuring the AV devices, rather than worrying about configuring the network. Organizationally, that saves us a lot of time on how we deliver projects.

The most valuable feature is definitely the fully functional IGMP snooping and querier, out-of-the-box, that the switch provides. With most if not all switches that we've worked with previously, at a minimum you have to enable a couple of different options. With some switches there are several things that you have to enable. It can be cumbersome for AV techs who don't have much experience working with switches to configure those things, and difficult for them to troubleshoot. It's really a good feature to have that stuff enabled and fully functional out-of-the-box so that they don't have to worry about configuring any of that stuff.

Overall, the switch is very easy to use. Because they have the IGMP fully enabled out-of-the-box, in most cases an AV technician won't even need to configure anything on the switch. But in the event that they do need to configure it, their switches have a really nicely laid out, consistent web user interface that I think is pretty intuitive and easy to use.

The AV over IP works great as long, as the network is configured correctly. If you don't have the IGMP querier and snooping set up correctly, you can very easily flood the network to the point where it becomes unusable. Also, especially when you use multiple switches, you have to be very aware of how much bandwidth you need to connect the switches together.

The SDVoE also works great. It's just another type of AV over IP, so again, as long as you have all of the multicast stuff set up correctly, and the appropriate bandwidth between switches if you're using multiple switches, it works great. SDVoE is very easy to use. You get all of the value of being able to put AV on the network and all of the flexibility of it. So far it's been pretty easy for us.

And the warranty is one of the most compelling aspects of the NETGEAR switches. Other manufacturers would charge a lot of money for the exact same warranty that is included in the price of the switch with NETGEAR.

One thing I have asked for, something that NETGEAR lacks that I would love to see — and from what I understand it's in the works — is a REST API to programmatically interface with multiple switches. That would be a great feature.

We got this switch about six months ago.

The stability has been great. I haven't experienced any issues.

The scalability is another aspect of the NETGEAR platform that we find very compelling. The M4300, on its own, isn't super-scalable, although the M4300-96X is pretty scalable. But when you combine those with their 100 GB switches, it becomes extremely scalable and you can make very large systems.

Technical support is excellent. I've only actually had to contact them once, and the one time that I did they were a pleasure to deal with.

Before using the NETGEAR switches we used Cisco Catalyst and their SG small business series, as well as Extreme and Luxul. We still offer Cisco and Extreme, specifically when our clients request them.

We went with NETGEAR because somebody from NETGEAR reached out to our director of engineering to set up a meeting. That was when they were first pushing into the pro-AV space. Our director of engineering brought me into that meeting. When they laid out the functionality of their switches and the price point, with maintenance included, we thought it was a great fit for the solutions that we sell.

There are two things that jump out at me as differences between NETGEAR and Cisco The first is the price. The NETGEAR switches that have all of the features that we need are significantly lower in price than Cisco. And again, the maintenance is included for free, whereas maintenance has a pretty hefty price tag associated with it with Cisco. The second is that NETGEAR is putting an increased focus on supporting the AV integrator market, and that's something that we take a lot of advantage of.

If you're deploying a single switch it can be done in a matter of minutes. You just take it out of the box, put it in a rack, and power it on.

Once you start adding multiple NETGEAR switches, it's not any more or less complex than doing so with other manufacturers' switches. You have to follow basic guidelines for making sure the VLANs are consistent across the switches and making sure that the interconnectivity between the switches has been configured correctly.

Our standard implementation strategy, when going into a new deployment, is that we have a set of base VLANs that we normally configure on the switches, and then a standard strategy of how we interconnect our switches. We try to replicate that as much as possible on each job. 

It takes just one good network engineer for deployment, at least for the network part of it, including configuration. And similarly, it takes just one for maintenance.

If you're deploying a single switch, you definitely don't need to be an IT expert to deploy it. To monitor it and troubleshoot it you do need to have some amount of IT knowledge, but I don't know that you'd need to be an expert.

The systems work reliably, and they work well, so that's a good return on investment.

The price-to-performance of the solution is very good. You get very high performance for a low cost per port. Compared to standard AV switching, NETGEAR is probably the best value out there.

My advice would be: Don't be afraid to look at manufacturers who aren't the big names in networking. You can find switches that will meet your needs without having to pay a premium for it.

What I've learned from using this solution is that it's possible to provide great features in a network switch without having to pay a ton of money for it.

The 10 GB switching is something that we're starting to see more and more of, especially as the costs keep coming down. In our company specifically, we actually do a lot more of 1 GB than 10 GB. The 1 GB AV over IP solutions are primarily what we're delivering to customers. We haven't much need to use the 10 GB solutions.

We use the switch as part of commercial AV large format displays, video walls, and high-capacity HD real-time displays. I don't honestly know, off the top of my head, what the number of displays would be. I typically just handle the network side of things so I'm not sure how large those installations have gotten. But once you move past having a single switch and you go to multiple switches, it does start to get increasingly complex to properly configure the network, as does the troubleshooting if the need arises.

They do offer a network monitoring tool that we plan on looking into more. We just recently got it set up and installed. That is the next thing that we'll be looking into, to see how much we can utilize it.

I would rate NETGEAR a nine out of 10. Once they get that REST API rolled out then it will be a 10.

The primary use case for this switch was for when we were involving the more intensive AV over IP stuff, specifically the SDVoE products that NETGEAR has partnered with. The reason that we picked them over competitors was knowing that they were one of the founding partners of the SDVoE Alliance, which gave us a lot of assurances that the product would work well in this type of deployment. 

In our experience, any type of AV over IP stuff has always been plagued with some sort of network hiccuping, and there is always a big learning curve. Therefore, knowing that NETGEAR specifically worked with the SDVoE Alliance to make it work, this gave us a lot of confidence going into this project.

The use case was for a high school's distributed audio/video system. So, it ran audio/video in multiple gymnasiums, gathering spaces, and small collaboration rooms.

The reason that we went with SDVoE is the amount of sources and destinations were high enough, where if we were ever going to do it over traditional HDBaseT or some type of matrix switcher, then it would've been some crazy card loaded thing and I would've had to mix copper and fiber. It was enough that if we had to get into a 32x32 matrix switch, and at that price point, I was like, "This is silly, let's just go AV over IP, then we have no limitations or concerns with our inputs and outputs. We also have no risk of them adding a thirty-third input, then throwing out that switch and having to buy a whole new one."

In this specific case that we've used it for, we replaced a video matrix switch with it. The original design from the bid was to use a big 32x32 matrix switch. We decided that since we are doing a bunch of other network stuff here as well, in terms of control and audio, why don't we do audio, video, and everything over IP, putting everything on the same switch. So, instead of having 14 different devices to manage, I have five. It worked out really well in the long run.

We use M4300-96X and M4300 48-Port PoE 1Gb switches. At the moment, we are just using this with one customer.

If our company was going to buy a new office and deploy a bunch of stuff, it would be one of these switches that I would purchase, especially because you're able to stack different models and types, then manage it nice and easily. I could see, as a network administrator, the ability to look at your entire network from one page and have the ability to diagnose and fix problems in one area. That would be fantastic.

We did a deployment where we were running about a 10Gb video endpoint sources, so we were utilizing a much larger amount of backplane bandwidth than we were used to using. We used the 96X as the core switch, then stacked it with the other single gigabit switches. So, knowing that the 96X had more than enough of backplane bandwidth than anything we could throw at it now or in the future, makes us confident that we were going in the right direction. Not to mention, the 96X was one of the only switches that I could find that would do 10Gb with POE over copper, which was a hard fast requirement for our job.

Honestly, getting the 10Gb to work was simple. Just follow good termination practices in terms of your fiber and your copper, then it worked flawlessly. For us to have a system where we can run a 4K video source virtually anywhere in a building without having to worry about really expensive matrix switchers, etc., this is the way AV is going in the next little while. In this project, we knew that we were ahead of the curve, and there was no chance of running into bandwidth limitations, or anything like that.

It wasn't a feature that I knew I would need, but once we deployed it, it came in very handy. You can stack different models of switches. The fact that we can stack the 96X, which is the modeler switch for 10Gb cards or 40Gb. We can stack that with the 1Gb PoE 48 port switch. The ability to mix and match is invaluable. So, we didn't have to run massive super extensive switches in the data closets where it wasn't necessary. Being able to manage it all from one place, as all your network configuration settings went live across your entire building from one management console was really handy.

Since this is my first time working with this specific switch interface, the interface was pretty intuitive. The only area I found a little bit confusing was how they separated IGMP. So IGMP integration could be found both in the switching area of the switch, but also in the routing area of the switch. Therefore, it wasn't super clear which of those did which. As a beginner with the switch. it was a bit confusing at first to know, for example, "Where do I need to set this up? If I'm doing this, why does this work, and why doesn't this work?" Otherwise, the interface of the switch is pretty simple. I just found the IGMP a bit convoluted.

I was able to reach out to another guy who had used this particular switch in the past. He sort of explained some of the nomenclature that NETGEAR uses to explain things. It's just different from some of the other (especially lower-end) switches that I've worked with. It is just finding out how people explain their particular way to doing things.

The IGMP specifics of the web management console could use a bit of clarification. This is sort of a specific thing. Every switch manufacturer has their own idiosyncrasies, like managing Dell switches for QoS, I find to be really weird. However, QoS on the NETGEAR was brilliantly easy and super self-explanatory.

I would like an email notification in case of errors or failures. If it was possible for the switch to email out an error log or notification note, especially in cases where we have the switches offsite (on the other side of town), then if something was to go wrong, it would be great to know about it before our client goes to use it for a big event, and it doesn't work. While I know that it does do SNMP, which is sort of standard, in the AV world, that is not always an option for us. We are usually running our own little network box and don't always have access to an SNMP server. We may just have simple Internet access or something similar. This is a very common feature on other managed equipment, like control systems, projectors, and certain power management devices. These have that email notification built into them.

A use case that I can think of is say somebody accidentally cuts an uplink wire between two switches. It would be fantastic if your core switch or one of the other switches could notice that disconnect and fire on an email to the manager, or the client, saying, "Hey, we've detected this problem. It happened at this time and date." Instead of having to run around the building trying to find out why things aren't working, you could have that information from a service standpoint ahead of schedule.

So far, in the year that they have been deployed, the switches have been pretty maintenance free. It does depend on your location. If it is in a dusty location, you will want to get in there and give it a cleaning every once in a while. However, the firmware updates and monitoring are nice and easy. 

The only issue that I have ever had was after a power outage. When the system came back up, the IGMP querier didn't elect properly. Then, I had to dive into the web console and disable it, then enable it for the querier to come back up again. That was the only hiccup that I found, where I could see the settings were correct in the switch, but for reasons that I couldn't quite figure out, it didn't actually elect a querier. So, this caused some broadcast storm issues on the switch. Once, I re-enabled it, it worked fine.

You are not limited in terms of stacking ports, and especially, if you're using the 96X as a core switch, the scalability, I could see this being very large. If you're using a type of a hybrid topology with a core switch going out to multiple switch stacks, or something like that, I could see the scalability of this being very good, especially considering the type of backplane switching capacity on the 96X.

Our customer uses it virtually everyday. As for expansion plans, it is used in an educational facility. Therefore, plans for expansion are always there, but they only happen when there is funding available. They are planning on adding additional display locations into other areas of the building and the ability to live stream from any of their sources out to YouTube and other sources. There is definitely talk of expansion and potential upgrades to the 4K sources and displays in the future.

We are using 15 percent of the switch's capacity right now. We are in no rush of maxing out the equipment.

My first experience with NETGEAR tech support wasn't fantastic. When I was having issues trying to get the IGMP sorted out, I called tech support. They wanted me to pay to talk to the tech support, and I had literally bought the switch two months ago. I expressed my frustration to that. I was like, "There is no warranty and no actual support for the product that you just sold me?" That is when I involved a a guy who was much smarter than me out in Toronto, and had worked with these types of issues before. 

Eventually, when I posted on the forums, however, I had great support. When I posted on their NETGEAR forums, I received some emails and phone calls from NETGEAR tech support. They had me to do some packet captures and send information. From what I know, they actually based one of their firmware updates on some of the issues that we were having.

My first instinct when I have tech support issues is to try to get somebody actually on the phone, and getting through to the right person on NETGEAR's general number was a bit challenging. However, when I reached out through their web forum, it was pretty good. Not only did I get some great advice and support from fellow NETGEAR users, but I also had engineers directly following up with me. Then, the same person that emailed me was also the person that called me, so I had a single point of contact from then on, which was nice. I wasn't caught in a customer service black hole.

The performance, expandability, and price point comparison, along with the redesigned part of the spec, made a convincing case to switch to the 96X. There was also AP over IP, in terms of how it manages audio and tracking from video. When we were able to show the cost and performance benefits to the client, they were onboard.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I don't have a lot of networking background, and I was able to get it up and running through either the intuitiveness of the web console or online documentation, which was pretty reassuring.

I spent probably about three days getting the network stuff configured, then another day doing deployment and commissioning. Setting up the switches was pretty easy, but making sure that the switches worked with the 47 different devices that I had a connected to it, that is where most of the time took.

When the SDVoE installations are configured correctly, the performance is amazing. Depending on the specific video equipment that you are using, the switching is either literally instantaneous or fairly fast and glitch-free. If somebody were to tell me this was video over IP, I wouldn't be able to notice. There is no artifacting, no compression, nor latecy. For mission-critical, high-end video, SDVoE is the way to go.

If it were just an SDVoE situation, I could literally plug it right out-of-the-box and go. In our particular installation, we were also using Q-SYS audio over IP, Dante, and some other control systems on the same network. Therefore, there is a bit of configuration to get all of those different protocols to play well on the switch in terms of managing QoS, managing different versions of IGMP, and making sure the filtering wasn't causing packets to get lost. However, once it was configured, it was nice and stable. It's been running for months without any issues and no downtime at all.

I had a consultant out in Toronto who helped me out with some of the more detailed IGMP configuration issues, but it's was mostly just me.

This switch isn't for the DIYer. A DIYer should get one of those easy cloud managed ones, like an Ubiquiti, etc. Because if you need this switch, you're probably doing a type of deployment where you need to have some network jobs. You don't need to be the guy who does everything through a terminal or certified network specialist in order to set up the basic settings, but some experience using managed switches is definitely an asset.

We had our goal: a multiroom rather large deployment. We shop tested everything before we deployed it onsite. We had all of the switches set up and linked with fiber and connected to as many of the devices that we could. We ran it through a mock setup and sort of torture tested it to see if it would survive power cycling, brownout, or devices connecting and disconnecting.

We wanted to do this because the site was rather large and having to do this type of servicing and testing when everything was deployed would have been really problematic. We found and addressed a few small idiosyncrasies that would have been very challenging onsite, because some equipment was stored up in ceilings or in areas which were hard to access.

The real return on investment is the ability of future scalability. Knowing if their building grows or as their AV and IP needs in the building grow that we can easily accommodate it. What is bad about the old way of doing AV is that when you max out your equipment, the only way to add more is to usually throw out that piece of equipment that you previously bought, and buy a new, bigger piece of equipment, then go from there. This has much higher equipment costs. There are the reconfiguration costs and the installation cost. If you're a dealer, it's always great to make a lot of money, but the way that we like doing business is to try to find the smartest, best, long-term solution for our clients.

For example, if they want another projector, then we will throw another projector in. This one is SDVoE compatible. Great, then we will just plug that projector right into our AV network, and we're done. There are no extra cards to buy. There is no matrix switch to switch out for something bigger. There are no worries about whether this device has to be Crestron, because we have a Crestron switch, then we have to have to buy a Crestron from now until eternity. The fact that SDVoE is an open standard will definitely make things much better in the future.

It was an initial, single purchase for us. For the three switches, because I had the 96X and the two 48 port single gigabyte ones, then all the cards, etc. The total price on it, which may be a little on the low side, for the client was around $16,000 or $17,000. 

In terms of the NETGEAR stuff, there weren't any surprises. The costs were definitely fair, especially considering what we were replacing. For the equivalent performance from a non-AV over IP solution, it would have been easily been in the $40,000 range. Comparing it to standard AV video switching, the price was very good, especially considering now they can add-on without any massive additional costs.

When I started looking around at other competing options, the price to performance for the NETGEAR M4300 was above everything else. For what we needed, especially with the 96X where we can add in additional cards later, this saved our clients easily thousands of dollars on this install. We only needed eight or twelve quarts of copper, but they do eventually want to add some more in the future. So, instead of having to buy a 10Gb switch with copper and PoE with 48 ports, which would've been an amazingly expensive devise, I could buy the 96X and put in the two cards and load the fiber that I needed. I could do fiber and copper in the same switch, which is just brilliant.

Depending on the size and scope of the project, we might use a different switch. For our smaller, simpler projects, we are typically using Luxul because they are very inexpensive and a decent performing switch. They also have some certain form factor things that we like to have, such as all their ports are on the back. With some of our clients, I would rather not have to touch their network, so not having anything to physically plug into on the front of their equipment practices is a big deal. Then, for some other QSC specific stuff, they have some preconfigured switches from Dell that we've used just from a warranty and service standpoint. E.g., if the manufacturer provides and preconfigures the switch, they'll warranty any switch issues, which is, for us as a company who provides service, a big deal.

For this project, I looked into a few other options, like Cisco. However, all the information that I could find on them, like their pricing, for what I needed was not competitive. Because this was an SDVoE project, I felt much more comfortable going with NETGEAR. knowing they are one of the founding partners of the SDVoE Alliance.

The advice I would give: Work with somebody, if possible to think about your backbone needs. Think about the network deployment and the design, because the last thing that you want to do is a four switch stack and run out of trunk capacity, switching capacity, or PV capacity. Even though the 96X is a more expensive piece of hardware than the other parts of the M4300, do not discount it as a great solution for a master or core switch.

There is one other guy in our organization who helps in terms of service and support, but for anything network-oriented, it's me.

I would rate the M4300 as a nine (out of ten). I was a non-expert, who felt fairly comfortable configuring and managing the switch. This is a big part of my rating. Also, the ease of doing things, like switch stacking and setting up trunks, which can be sort of confusing and scary, was great.

The available types of of hardware options for the 96X are amazing. In the same physical switch, you can put a 40Gb card, 10Gb copper, 10Gb fiber, and 1Gb copper or fiber, and you are able to hot swap it. It's just killer. There are not a lot of solutions which do this, and not anywhere close to the price point that NETGEAR does.

I'm using them for network switching for SMB. The Insight line is the SMB line, that's what they're trying to break into with this line. I've used them at a country club and at a restaurant, both of which have VLANs. We're using them at our office. I've got them in about eight different locations now, in different environments.

It has saved a lot of time. I haven't tried exporting out the configuration and then importing it into another one, so traditional switches might give you a little bit more that way because you can export out the configs (You can now export out configurations). The web management through one pane of glass for all of my NETGEAR switches has made it a lot easier. It makes it easy to compare settings from other sites when you're trying to duplicate what you've done in the past. You can look at it real quick - without having to remote all the way into a machine, and then try and get into the switch, and remember the IP address of the switch and the credentials of the switch. It's all right there for you. I have a single login for all of my switches.

The cloud management has been huge for us. We have 80 clients and they all have switches. We've been migrating them over as much as we can, when it's called for, to the cloud-managed Insight ones. On those sites, we know more information without having to do complicated SNMP traps. We get nice emails, we get a web interface, and we're not having to wait for our RMM tools to get SNMP traffic to notify us. We don't have to do complicated configurations. It's all just part of the simple setup, of joining the switch to an account.

The remote management has been awesome. With the old-school style of switches, you actually had to be on the LAN, plug into it - you could get in remotely but you had to go through a computer and have other trickery to get in. With this, you literally just log in to a website, see all your clients, all your NETGEAR switches, and you can manage them all right there: the VLANs, powering on and off individual ports, rebooting the whole device, the firmware updates. Everything can be done remotely, so it's pretty awesome for an IT company. It saves time which means more profitability.

It's super-easy to use and deploy, probably one of the easiest managed switches I've ever used. I can have it pre-programmed and configured right through the web interface before I even plug it into the customer's site. By linking it to the account and doing the configuration, when I plug it in and turn it on at the client's site it gets the configuration automatically. The web portal is really awesome.

I've had to troubleshoot one out of eight, so that's a pretty good ratio. It's a brand new product, so we haven't really sold tons of them yet. The troubleshooting has been pretty easy because we do it remotely and we can reboot the whole device remotely. The only time it has become a problem is when there were multiple failures. We did have one case where the internet had gone out and it was just that the router needed to get rebooted, but we couldn't do anything to the switch because their internet was down. I had to go out there.

I'd like to see a little bit of slowdown on the firmware updates. They've been doing a lot of them. I don't know if that's just because it's such a new product line, but the firmware updates have been a little annoying because they've been coming once a week. For a switch, that's a little extreme.

It's worked for the most part, but we've had to power cycle a few devices. We've had to ask customers to manually power cycle them with the power cord, after some of the firmware updates. Their updating needs a little improvement. But if we're talking about a scale of one to ten, as far as hassles go, where ten is a huge hassle, it's been a two.

It would be nice if it came in a couple different colors. Right now, they're just white. Some customers want the whole black setup, they want everything to look black and to be black and these only are offered in white. I had one customer not want it because it was white.

In the very beginning, we had that one problem with the firmware update where it took them all offline. That was a pain, but that's only been one instance. And it was a major update because they were updating the back-side - the web side - and the hardware side at the same time, and it didn't go so smoothly. We had to have people power cycle them. Other than that, they've been very stable. We're using one in our office and we haven't had any technical malfunctions due to bad manufacturing. We've had no hardware failures.

Scalability is there. They have all the different sized switches. There are definitely options, everything from an 8-port up to even a 28-port with the fiber links. We're doing is SMB, so we're not doing enterprise-level. They added the 52-port switch too. Scalability is going to be great. Hopefully I will get a client that needs a 52-port switch, but for the most part, we're doing the 8s and the 16s, so far.

Overall, tech support has been good and bad. The first deployment I did, I needed some help but their tech support didn't even know about the products because they were so new. That was months ago. I needed help because I didn't quite understand the licensing and I wanted to talk to somebody. They were a little mystified too. I got past that.

When I did an install about a month ago, I needed some help with the VLAN stuff. It ended up being my fault because of the way I was tagging things, the way I had set it up. NETGEAR support walked me right through, noticing the problem and helping me get it fixed. The person I got on the phone blew me out of the water. He just knew everything. He said, "Oh yeah, no problem. Do this. Do that." He walked me right through it. And he spoke English, which was good.

I'm a little different than a normal end user because I have a partner relationship. On that one I was getting frustrated and I called my partner rep directly and he put me right into tech support. I don't think I went through the normal channel on that one.

We were using NETGEAR switches and SonicWall routers and access points before, but the price point on those was getting so crazy compared to like what Ubiquity was offering. We started using Ubiquity because they were so cheap. We could do three networks for the same price as one SonicWall, or the NETGEAR enterprise-level stuff, or any of the old enterprise-level stuff, including Cisco. So we went to Ubiquity, did a couple of big networks with it and it was great. But I wasn't super-happy with their web interface. It was getting a little clunky and there were a lot of features missing or labeled as being in BETA when they should've been released already and I didn't like that.

We were using both Ubiquity and the traditional NETGEAR managed switches. We made the switch to Insight mainly because of the WiFi. We liked the cloud-based controller for the WiFi. That's why we did Ubiquity. We've probably got a few hundred Ubiquity access points out there.

My NETGEAR partner rep called me and let me know about the new Insight stuff. He said, "We're coming out with these to directly compete with Ubiquity and Aruba and the like, and would you give it a try?" I said, "Yeah, I've always like NETGEAR," and we started with the access points. We put in about ten for the first install that we did. It went really smoothly and I liked it. I used the NETGEAR switch at the same time, the 16-port Insight switch. It all went really super-smoothly, even though it was my first time working with this newer style of technology. 

I did a few WiFi deployments with them and I really liked the manageability. I've loved it ever since. Now we're trying to migrate over to it exclusively.

It's the same reasons as the switches, I can get into everything, anywhere, any time, even from my cell phone. If a client calls me up and says "Hey, my WiFi's being weird," instead of having to ask him to go find the cords to unplug it, I can literally reboot it from my cell phone. Same with the switches. That's been a time saver for us, as an IT company and a pain-point saver for our end users because we don't have to ask them to do anything. They love that.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's literally: Plug it into a network that's on the internet, go to your NETGEAR account, add the serial number, and it activates the device. If you just want to use it as a regular switch, you don't have to do all that. You could just plug it in and use it. If you want use it as a smart switch with the web functions, the cloud-based functions, you have to license it and activate it, but it's a very straightforward process. You buy a token and when you add the device to your account it says, "Hey, you have an available token. Apply it to this device?" "Yes." As soon as the device goes on the internet, it's licensed to your account. It's that easy.

It's a network switch so if you're not doing anything fancy with it, deployment takes five to ten minutes. If you have the token pre-purchased, it's even faster than that. You literally just plug it in. That's any switch though, unless if you're doing some programming like VLANing. Then it takes a little bit longer. It depends on the environment. There's no operating system, there's nothing to really configure, depending on the environment. Most SMB clients have very simple environments. WiFi is starting to add to that where people, even in the SMB market, want more VLANs for guest WiFis and other WiFi's. Out of the eight I've done with the Insights switches, I had to do VLANs for four of them, and it was really easy.

The most complicated setup was one where I did a 16-port version and I had to do three different VLANs, so that was a pain. It wasn't even that hard. The switch side was very easy; it was the programming of all the access points.

For that one I had to plan a little bit. I had to lay out which WiFi I wanted on which VLAN. When everything is on the switch though, it's very straightforward: Log in to a website, click on that switch, go to the VLAN section and tag it with one of the two or three types of VLAN tagging. I had to figure out which VLAN I wanted on which jacks on the switch, etc. I did it really simply. The first half of the switch was one VLAN and the second half of the switch I split into two more sections. So half of it was one VLAN and the other E-ports I split up into four-port chunks to do a VLAN for each one. I then plugged all my WiFi access points in and my hard-wired computers. So there was some planning. It was more like network development planning than strategizing and worrying about the switch.

If you're trying to do a very simple setup and you're not doing anything too crazy with a bunch of VLANs, and you're just trying to set up your small business with a small A-port and you're plugging in a couple computers and a printer, but you want your switch to be on the internet so you know if something goes wrong - for all of that you don't have to be an expert. It is that easy. I normally type in the serial number, but the app on your phone will take a picture of the QR code on the device to add it to the account. It's that easy. It's making me feel like I might not have a job in ten years. With the old ones you had to have a special cable to plug into the switch to get into the console to manage it. No one could do that. Even as an IT person, I hated doing that. It's a night-and-day difference.

For the price, they're good. If you look at Ubiquity switches (which have cloud features too) or even the regular NETGEAR GS switches, these are still price-competitive and come with the cloud features, which is just amazing.

I sold someone a SonicWall and they had to redo their subscription every year. It was a $300 or $400 subscription they had to pay every year and I got a small piece of that. With NETGEAR I am getting less from the subscription, because now it's only a $10 or $20 subscription per device for the whole year, instead of $300. But it's easier to sell the product because my clients aren't complaining that they're paying for super-expensive support and licensing for a year. To pay $200 per SonicWall access point, that's kind of crazy; or Cisco Meraki where you're paying $300 for the year. Now, you can pay $10 or $20 and you have your license and all your support.

The cost of the hardware and additional services is really low. It's competing with Ubiquity. We're probably getting a little more margin because the price is so low, so we can squeak in a little bit more margin for ourselves. The important thing, though, is that we're able to supply a better solution to the client. Now, instead of the client spending $800 to get one WiFi access point, we can do three access points for $800 and they're just as strong, signal-wise, as the $800 ones. That means we have a better-deployed mesh network. Instead of just one access point placed as best we could, we have a stronger mesh. We can design a better network because it's more affordable for small businesses, and that includes the Ethernet switches and the access points.

NETGEARs have been my go-to switches ever since 3Com went away. I've tried other ones too, like TP-Link, a bunch of Intel switches. I tried the HPE switches for a little bit. But NETGEAR has always been easy to use, straightforward, good, and works.

From an IT vendor's perspective, make sure to get the right licensing. Make sure to get the licensing that allows you to do the tenants and have it all separated. Definitely make sure to get the higher-end licensing, the Pro version and not the Basic or Premium.

For end users, my only advice would be to keep it simple. Don't get too crazy with it. It's hard to not keep it simple with these devices. They are made for small business and they are made to be simple. Don't over-complicate things. Just get what you need. They're pretty easy. A switch is a switch and an end user typically is not doing anything too complicated, other than linking a bunch of devices together. It's pretty much just plug it in, for them.

Our organization is an IT company, and there's only two of us using it inside the building. He's a network technician and I'm a network engineer. And as a technician, he hasn't had any issues using them either. He hasn't even really needed to call me for help, as an engineer. He hasn't needed my expertise. It's been easy for him and he's new to managed switches too. It's been good. I've been able to let him do stuff in them without having to oversee him, because it's been easy for him.

Deployment and maintenance need something like one person for every 100. They're really easy and you can manage them all from one place, in one website. You don't need a lot of people watching over them. It's really easy for one person to watch over hundreds of them.

We're actually going to start using it as our Hardware as a Service and start trying to market it that way and push out these devices where we own them and allow clients to use them as a service. We're going to use the NETGEAR stuff for that.

They just redid their management on the backside. Before it was either Premium or Basic but now they have the Pro version which allows me to group all my clients together. I can group locations by client and I can give clients direct access to their own stuff too. So I can have admin-level access to all my clients and then give the individual clients direct access to their own stuff, so we're not holding anybody hostage either. It's been pretty cool for that. We've just been really happy with it. We're moving to them as our main networking and WiFi products.

I was just at the NETGEAR SMB Council. The Insight product has been out for about a year, and some of the people who got on it when it first came out had a lot of complaints about how it was dumb when it first came out and about the issues they had. They did say it got a lot better for them. I got on the products a little bit later, I didn't get into to it until three or four months ago. For me it's been pretty smooth, other than that one update where we had to reboot stuff. So depending on when someone started using the stuff they might have different opinions. The early adopters might not have liked it as much because of the issues they had in the beginning, issues that NETGEAR fixed, going forward. I noticed that some of the partners there who had been using it longer did have a bad taste in their mouths. That was because they onboarded so early that it didn't really have a chance yet.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. I will give some stuff a ten, but it's pretty rare. The updating process has been easy, it works over the web, but it's been a little too often, and that's causing email triggers. We get annoyed by the constant bombardment of emails from their devices - and the more devices you have, the more you get bombarded. Any time there's a firmware update, they have to reboot and there's an email notification, so you start to get a lot of emails. The notifications need to be a little cleaner. But from a functional standpoint it's been pretty solid, if we're just talking about just the switches.