NETGEAR Switches Reviews

The primary use case is generally small office, and multiple users with the same customer.

For us, the Insight platform is a consistent experience from one office to the next. A user can connect to one access point in one office and then automatically connect to another access point in the office, without having to do any WiFi connections or passwords. So the user experience is seamless.

And that also saves time. It's only a few minutes per user for each office we go to, but it soon adds up and reduces frustration.

The most valuable feature is the Insight application itself, with its ease of management. 

Also, the remote management tools are fantastic. The combination of the webpage as well as the app makes life so much easier. I don't need to go and visit sites to do upgrades or any sorts of changes. The firmware can all be deployed remotely. I can see the traffic on each of the switch ports remotely as well, so I can see if we've got problems, down to an individual port. It's very granular.

It's easy to use and deploy. It's just a simple case of assigning a switch to one of the already-configured network offices. Then, as soon as the device pairs up, it downloads the configuration and it's good to go. It's very simple.

The management tools are very straightforward. They're well laid out in terms of the concepts, and configuration and adding new devices are very easy. It's very straightforward.

My one issue with it is that not all the features of the switch can currently be managed via the portal. For some of the more advanced features, you still have to configure the switch. We tend not to use those features, so it's not a problem.

It's coming along. Quite regularly, the platform is being updated so those features are definitely coming. Every month or two, when I log in, there are new features available online. So we can start to implement the features that, historically, we'd have to go to site to implement. They're not features that are critical to our use.

It's the wireless access-point aspect and some of the routing capabilities on the wireless access point that I'm referring to. For example, the peer-to-peer bridging isn't available. You have to configure the access points directly for that.

The stability is very good. We've only had one problem and that turned out not to be the switch. It was another device. But it highlighted where the problem was, so it was very good.

They do come in different sizes: small, medium, and large. From our perspective, the scalability is great. It suits all our needs. At most, I think we have three of the 24-port switches in one location. The scalability is very good.

That would be for 25 people, maximum. Everybody has two devices so there would be 50 or 60 on it, in total, once we add in tablets and phones.

I've never needed to contact tech support. The switches come with a quite extensive warranty of three or five years, and 90 days worth of free initial support. But it is that straightforward to set up and configure that we've never needed to contact them.

We used existing, legacy NETGEAR devices in the past. We were just keeping up to date and seeing the changes in the products they were bringing, and that's how we came across Insight.

At the office, on the Insight platform, the individual switch setup is very straightforward. You just scan the barcode and you plug it in. That said, setting up in an office is very straightforward as well because it's all web or app-driven.

For an individual device, it probably takes longer to put it in the rack and screw it in. To actually install it, have it configured and running, it's less than 30 minutes.

In terms of an implementation strategy, each office is different sized and has different capabilities and different requirements. So there isn't a generic strategy in that sense. But configuration is all centrally managed. The individual switches are sized based on the office. A smaller office might have two or three of the smaller Ethernet switches, just for redundancy. A very small office might just have a single switch. But all that configuration is done centrally so the actual implementation strategy is just: Turn up on site and plug it in.

You don't need to be an IT expert to deploy and support a network. It is that straightforward. It requires no staff for deployment. Because it's all centrally configured, you don't need to have any staff to deploy it. You just need to be able to plug in the cable.

The fact they continue to work and can be managed remotely is all about cost savings. We don't incur travel costs to update switches. None of the switches have been faulty.

We've carried out four or five firmware updates this year, remotely. That has probably reduced travel by 300 or 400 miles. That saves travel costs and travel time.

They're good value. They're good entry-level switches. I know Cisco generally has a lot more capability. But, for an organization this size, we don't need that. So they're good value for the cost and what we need.

The cost of the hardware and additional services is low compared to others. Anything that's cheaper, for the same output, is a good thing for our business.

Go for it They're very straightforward to purchase and setup time is very minimal, especially if you've got a lot of small, remote offices, because you get the central management. The big feature for us that centralized management and the remote capabilities.

The apps for the phones are good. I have an Android phone, and it's also available on iOS. You can remotely manage and monitor even without having to sit at a desk. That is very useful.

The Insight platform itself - for VPN, firewalls, and storage devices - is a good, centralized platform for managing all of that. Although we've only really talked about the switching, it has other features as well, which make it sensible for us as a centralized management platform. It's appropriate for medium to large businesses. 

I haven't really had to use the remote troubleshooting much. The one time I did, it was very detailed regarding the point where the problem was and we could identify the problem. It ended up being on a non-switch device so we had to have an engineer go to the site to fix it. But it was very quick to identify exactly where that problem was, down to an individual port and the device connected into that port. I have been troubleshooting the network as opposed to the devices and, in my experience, it's very good.

In terms of maintenance, it's all done remotely so we've needed only one staff member, with very little overhead. At one of the offices, for example, they turn everything off at night. We get an alert saying the network is down, but when they turn it back on in the morning, we get an alert saying the network is back up. There's very little management on top of that.

The businesses where we deploy them have plants and office locations. As they sign up and grow, we'll definitely deploy more.

• We have used their SOHO switches and some of their enterprise-class switches in our educational environment.
• Mainly just to get more ports in an office or other room.
  

They are reasonably priced and have worked pretty well for us.

• The price, and for the most part it has been reliable. 
• Their enterprise-class switches have a way to go with their CLI as compared to for instance Cisco, etc. This is I think due to a lack of maturity in this market.

They need to implement a fully-featured CLI in their enterprise-class switches if they want to compete in that space and market.

I'm using the switches in small business environments and I'm using them with the cloud management. That way, I can get notifications when there are problems without even being on site, and I can also manage them remotely.

The improvement is that, if there's an issue, I don't have to go onsite to look into it. It saves time, which translates to money. If I'm on the road for any significant time, my clients are going to get trip charges. My being able to remotely manage it means they can save those costs, and it could be back up more quickly because it might be something minor that I can remotely resolve.

The cloud management is the reason I switched to them, although the regular NETGEAR product line that I've used would be less expensive. I love the cloud management feature.`

They are easy to use and deploy. The deployment can be done through the direct interface of the device or through the cloud management if that mode is selected. But it's nice, if there is an issue, to be able to go in through the remote. The fact that the remote doesn't require a static IP - even though most small businesses do have static IPs, you do run into some that don't - is nice. They initiate the contact to the outside world, without requiring a static to get in.

The switch has been really easy. Anybody who has been in the business can hop on there and change stuff right away.

I've used and sold NETGEAR stuff for a long time and I was really excited about the cloud product. But, there are some design issues on which they really missed the boat. The problem has to do with rack mounting them because the lights and jacks should all be on the front, and the power on the back. The way they did it makes it really difficult to use them in a rack environment, because when the lights are on the opposite side of the jacks. They just don't lend themselves to a rack environment.

I'm absolutely amazed that they did what they did because they've been building switches for years and this totally violates all of the design parameters on all their other products. You can't have a device that's expected to go into a rack environment - and they ship with the rack mount - yet the jacks are on one side, and all the indicator lights you need to look at are on the back. You usually can't see the back side of a rack. You can't get back there to see, so it's just crazy. It's like they designed it to hang on a wall, rather than to be mounted in a rack. They're really missing their bigger opportunity by doing that. It's so bad that I have to consider whether or not to use them. What good are indicators if you can't look at them? And you can't do so in the current design because they're on the back side.

If you look at their entire product line, nothing is like that. It just makes no sense at all. If they would put the power on the back and the indicators on the front, it would be like every other switch they manufacture, and it would resolve all those issues. 

I want to use it. I just hope that they fix their design.

Another issue, when it comes to NETGEAR's competitors, is that other companies are offering the cloud management at no extra charge, whereas NETGEAR charges for it. You have to pay per-device for licenses.

I haven't had any issues with the stability. I just learned about the cloud model a few months ago and the first ones I rolled out were shortly after that.

In the size of environments I've worked with, it's been working great. For example, I had one where, in some parts of the building they've got some of the 8-ports, and in other locations, they've got the 24-ports and 48-ports. The product line is there. I've interconnected them using the 10-gig cross-connects for the 24s and 48s. It's the 24- and 48-port models that have a 10-gig SPF connection option. That's really nice because you get high performance between devices.

I haven't needed to contact technical support.

I was using NETGEAR's switches prior. The Insight is the newer product line. Their sales department contacted me when I first expressed interest in the product and they had one of their sales engineers do a webinar with me, showing me the product and the management.

I ended up going with NETGEAR because I've used their switches for a number of years. I've been around forever. 3Com was the original big company doing all of the switch technology. They didn't even have switches when I started. It was all hub technology back then. 3Com, obviously, was bought out by HP, so I used the HP line. I was introduced to the NETGEAR product line through another company that I partner with on jobs. They do the phone side, I do the data side. Because of IT voice technology, they had been using the NETGEARs. They introduced me to them and I liked them. They were a better price point. They were reliable. So I switched to NETGEAR. When I saw the advertisements for the Insight and the cloud management, it drew me into checking them out.

The concept of cloud management is great. If you could get one vendor that can cover all of the products, so you don't have multiple management windows, it would be nice. That's what I'm trying to do with NETGEAR, if they can just make some more improvements to the product.

I find the initial setup pretty straightforward. But again, I've worked on many pieces of equipment for 30 years, so it's easy for me.

You could deploy a switch instantly. You're not required to set any settings. You could just plug it in and use it. Somebody who doesn't know anything could use it. But if you want to take advantage of the management features, then it'll take a little bit longer. You'll have to set it up in either stand alone or Cloud managed mode and then configure it. But doesn't take long if you know what you're doing. It can be set up within ten minutes.

Most people in the business already know what their network structure is, so they know their IP subnets, etc. It's your option to throw your address on it or let DHCP assign it and then set up a couple things and you're done.

In terms of an implementation strategy, for my managed equipment I will always put a statically assigned address on it within the internal subnets of the company. That way, I'm not dependent upon DHCP being up and running at the time those devices reboot. On a typical network, all of the statics are documented, so I can pull up documentation to manage stuff. Of course, with the cloud management it gives you the ability to name the devices, so you can make descriptive names.

It takes one person to deploy and maintain it. I'm in an environment where I'm working with companies that don't have an IT staff. They're smaller than the size that can accommodate a full-time staff person. So, I'm the one supporting them.

Determining ROI gets tough when you get into some of these more expensive devices. Part of the problem is that it's a newer product line, so they don't have as many options as they will probably have in a couple years. Because there are fewer, there is a tendency to have more full-featured things that cost more, when you may not need all of the features.

The savings from the customer's perspective are when I can work on it remotely, without having to travel to their site. They're saving the trip charges and they can, potentially, be up quicker. That's going to save the customer money. The initial costs are more, but they can reap the benefits in the long term.

NETGEAR is not competitive when it comes to cloud management because Ubiquity is free. Peplink is free but you have to keep the device under warranty. After its initial warranty is up, you have to buy the extended warranty to keep it under cloud management. In that situation, the $10 a year on a router would be cheaper than keeping the device under warranty. But when you get into the access points in Ubiquity, they've got NETGEAR beat because it's free for that service. It's part of buying the product.

NETGEAR's new product is definitely more expensive than their standard product line. It's a new product line for them, so I'm hoping with the maturity of the product that those costs will come down. The standard product line is considerably cheaper. I'm not quite sure why, because there's not that much on the tech side. It really doesn't cost any more to build a managed device than it does to build a non-managed. That's usually all just in software implementations. Cloud-managed is going to be the mainstay. Everybody's going to go there. It's a matter of time until that's just the standard and everybody will expect everything to work in that environment.

Ubiquity is the one that's doing the free cloud management. I had been using some of their access points toward the concept of trying to get into unified management rather than all these different brands. I've been trying to do that with NETGEAR, with their access points, Ethernet switches, and routers. I'm just finding limitations, or it's not competitive if I have to pay $10 a year per device to manage the NETGEAR when Ubiquity will do it for free. It's part of the benefit of you buying their product. Ten bucks a year isn't much until you start having 20 devices at a company. Then it's an extra $200 that you have to get them to pay, when it's free with the other guy's product.

In terms of advice to someone who is looking into implementing this solution, I would have to know more about what their application was and what they were doing. It is going to cost them more and, if they're rack mounting it, there's definitely a negative on the switches; a big negative, because you can't see the lights.

Some aspects of the remote management tools are good and some need improvement. If you go to the new NETGEAR Insight router, there are features that aren't supported through the cloud management and you have to do them locally. That needs to be improved so that all of those features can be done through the cloud management. I'm using the version where they sell the license for $10 a year. It gives you access to control them. It's just the ability to go in and remote-manage whatever the feature set of the device is remotely, and get notifications when there's a problem on the network.

I've probably only put in ten of them so far. I've more used it for monitoring and initial setup. I haven't done much troubleshooting because they've been up and running. I haven't had the problem of them being down.

As for whether you need to be an IT expert to deploy and maintain the solution, it's tough for somebody like me, who has 30 years of IT experience, to make that judgment. For somebody who has never touched one, if you don't have those concepts, you wouldn't know what to do. You have to have a certain level. Somebody who has never done anything in technology isn't going to hop on there and know what to do, but it's not a problem with the switch, it's because they don't understand the technology.

In the first organization I implemented the solution in, there are about 40 devices on that network. There are four switches there.

I love the concept, I want to continue to use it. But I'm torn on this issue of whether or not they're going to correct the physical layout so that the lights are on the correct side.

In terms of how I rate it, I'm going to have to hit it, because it has the design flaw. Even though I'm using it, I'd throw it down at a three out ten, because it is really bad that the status lights can't be seen from the front. It's a major flaw. They anticipate rack mount, it comes with the rack mount kit. I can't believe it shipped; that it was designed that way. If that was resolved I'd probably throw it up around an eight. If they got rid of the fees for the management, I'd probably give them a nine or a ten. They have to look at the marketplace. They're not being competitive by charging the $10 per device for management.

I like NETGEAR as a company. I'm hoping that they will actually pay attention to the feedback and make changes to improve the product.

This particular unit controls all of the fiber optics coming in from each of our buildings for the property that we are managing.

At this particular facility, what they had was a Cisco router coming in, and then a gigabit switch. That switch went out to these 10 x 100 fiber optic switches, which were outdated. That bottlenecked the whole network at the network room, and then it went out to a media converter, and then to a gigabit switch, and then it went out to the clients' routers inside their homes. It was a pretty complex network.

The idea was to find the right product so I could eliminate all of those extra pieces and devices and the troubleshooting that went with them, and pare it down to only two pieces of equipment. The right equipment was the NETGEAR M4300-96X. It allowed me to be able to troubleshoot much quicker. It allowed the operations to be very seamless.

As far as remoting into it goes, it is very efficient because I can do it from anywhere, through the remote software. I can get right into it, I can change settings really quickly, if a customer needs to add another device into it or if I need to make changes on the VLANs which we created.

Another great function of this particular switch is that we have roughly 100-plus VLANs running through it and it's never had an issue. No hiccups, nothing. It just works like a well-oiled machine. It has saved us a lot of time and money and it allows our customers to be more efficient and save money too.

The most valuable feature to me is the modular side of things, being able to replace a module and a transceiver at our beck and call. If something goes down, or a piece of equipment is broken, I don't have to replace the whole switch. I can just replace the part that's broken or the part that is no longer working. I can get them back up and working within a matter of minutes, versus having to replace everything and reprogram everything. It's a huge time-saver.

The switch itself actually works fantastically. Getting into it works well, the console works well. The console user interface is very easy. A "question mark" is the big key to that whole console. If you don't know anything, it actually walks you through what to look for and how to look for it, when you're in different sections of the console.

Besides the modules, the software and the web interface, are actually very easy to use. They make life, programming, and everything very simple.

Right now I'm working with their technical support. When the power does go out, or if we do a soft shutdown, some of the transceivers or the monitor don't recognize when it turns back on, so I have to physically unplug it and plug it back in and then it works. We're working with NETGEAR's engineers to figure out why that's happening. 

Besides that, everything else is working great. It's on a UPS so it hardly ever goes down.

The M4300 is a workhorse. It works extremely well and it's very efficient. Besides the little problems that we still encounter when it powers off and powers back on, as long as the UPS stays working, it's never really given me any problems. I would purchase it again, absolutely.

The scalability is endless. Anywhere from putting in the gigabit ethernet ports, which we do have in the switch, to setting up full fiber optic 10 gig ports through the transceivers - depending on what fiber you're running - it is fully scalable. It can be very inexpensive or it can be very expensive depending on how much you're putting into it. But even at that point, it's going to do the job and probably better than most Ethernet switches out there.

Tech support is phenomenal. They've been great. They've always been there when I've needed them. They've called and remoted in if I needed them to look at certain issues. They've been wonderful. They've always performed at 100 percent for me. They've always been great to me and our company.

We took over this job and the solution that was there was probably the worst design I've ever seen. It was pretty much bottlenecked at the network and bottlenecked at each building in the complex. They were maxing out at 90 megs when there were 250 megs going through the full network.

We removed the media converter and the gigabit switch and got a full NETGEAR GS110, which has the fiber optic transceiver input. We had the ethernet ports on it too so we didn't have to use two pieces of equipment, just the one. We programmed VLANs and it works flawlessly. I've never had any issues with any of them.

For this particular property that we're working at, the setup was pretty complex because you can't have them all talk to each other. So the initial setup was making sure that each building has a specific IP address and a VLAN so that each person and each unit can't see the computers on someone else's network in a different building. Before I even designed the network I talked to NETGEAR's tier-three or tier-four engineers about how to make this work properly, and they were very helpful in making the setup easy.

The two pieces of the puzzle were that the switch was very easy to work with, and the firewall where we had to make sure that the policies were in place. But once they were in place, setup was actually really easy. For 270 units, it took us less than a month to install it, and get it programmed, and up and working 100 percent.

In terms of implementation strategy, I designed it in my computer system first. I took the layout that we got from our monitoring software, which basically monitored all of the different pieces of equipment there were on the network, and it looked like a big spaghetti bowl of networks going east and west. That is not what a network is supposed to look like.

My design was to make it look like a Christmas tree, with one point where the internet is coming in, and then it reaches the firewall, and from that it goes to the switch. From the switch it goes out to all of the different little switches, and then from the little switches, it reaches the customers' routers.

It's like a "family tree" type of design where you have the main point and then it just starts trickling down, versus going from one point where the internet is and then just spreading out east and west. With the old setup, there was no real way to troubleshoot the network. I made a simple to design from Point A to Point B, Point B to Point C, and then from Point C it goes out to all of the different points throughout the network, which was VLAN'ed out to each building. Then, each building has its own IP address.

It was very easy once I understood how it's supposed to be set up. We have a lot of different clients in various units, like a stockbroker or a financial person, so we had to lock down the network and make sure that no one else could see what they're doing and make sure that they didn't have cross-communication between each building.

I wouldn't say you have to be an IT expert, but you definitely need to know what you're doing. You definitely need to understand the concept behind the functionality of what the switch can do, especially VLANs and making sure what type of traffic is going through the network and through the firewall, so you can make sure that the communication is tagged properly.

You should have some years of experience working on a network like that in order to put it in place. I don't think a beginner would be able to get it to work efficiently. Even me, as a professional who has been in the industry a very long time - for over 15 years - it still took me a little bit of time to make sure that it was set up properly, by talking to the engineers to make sure that the functionality was working like it's supposed to.

We got the deployment done with two staff members; for the actual switch itself, one person is enough, easily.

It was just us, just our company. I did the full implementation myself. When I ran into any issues or needed to some questions answered I reached out to NETGEAR's engineering staff and they helped me.

We saw a return on investment immediately, as soon as we implemented the system, because we weren't going onsite to troubleshoot the existing problems. Being able to design it from scratch and utilizing good equipment allowed us to show the client that, in the end, we can cut back on our hours. We don't have to be there all of the time, which will save them money. And the time saved allows us to do other projects for them, which we're doing now.

I would say it has saved us about 30 to 40 percent.

When it comes to price-to-performance of the solution, overall, it's outstanding. That's one of the reasons I designed the network this way and chose this particular device. The overall cost was not that expensive compared to some of the competitors out there. Add to that the usability and functionality. And being able to troubleshoot the switch if there is a problem is so much easier because it's a modular switch. There are not too many modular switches out there.

The pricing is phenomenal. It's not only good for the company providing the solution, but the customer gets a good deal too. There's a good profit margin for the business to be able to resell it to a client or to offer a good price to the client. It's a win-win for both the company providing this particular equipment to the customer and for the customer.

The cost of hardware and additional services is low. We have three-year support that's built-in with NETGEAR, which is great. That might be standard in the industry, but as far as their help goes, they've been wonderful.

Right now, on the little switches, we're only using the switch. We're not really utilizing Insight because of the cost.

I looked at a lot of the competitors out there including NETGEAR vs Cisco Ethernet Switches and Barracuda; you name it. I looked at all the different switches. NETGEAR was the one that caught my eye, especially with that modular switch.

I looked into Ubiquiti, but we already had Ubiquiti access points on the property. Personally, I didn't like the way that the controllers and the software were set up. I definitely like the NETGEAR stuff better.

The price point, compared to a lot of the competitors that didn't have the modular switch, was about 20 to 30 percent less expensive. The functionality and the tech support were big things too, in my decision to go with NETGEAR.

If you're building out a network, utilize the skillsets of a consulting company that knows what they're doing, that understands what your problems are so that they find the right solution and the right products. Don't go to ABC Company and get a cookie-cutter package that's not really going to solve the problem that you have. Each does something different so having the right product on the network and knowing what the functionality of that product is, that's the big key to the puzzle.

Regarding the high-bandwidth AV over IP functionality, the property that we're managing has 270 units and they're all streaming on the network, either 4K or HD movies. They have Netflix and a lot of them use Amazon software or Amazon Fire, or they use a Roku or different streaming platforms through their TVs and on their network. High-bandwidth AV over IP allows the switch to just do its job, and the switch works really well.

We're not doing any routing through the switch, although it also has that capability which is great. Right now we have a firewall that's on the network that is controlling the routing but the switch does a phenomenal job, especially with the AV side of things. It has never held us back and the speed through it is pretty phenomenal. Most of it is through fiber optics so we're getting almost the full speed, which right now is at 250 by 250, at everyone's complex. Most of them are getting about 200, and we just upgraded the network to one gig, up and down, so we can't wait to see what the switch is able to do.

This solution is serving about 300 users. It doesn't take much for maintenance. As long as you do the firmware updates, and normally there aren't too many, it's good. We've put in place a lot of little things so backing it up is easy, it's automatic. The configuration file is easy. There's not much to do to maintain it because it does it automatically. It automatically backs up and it automatically updates the firmware. As long as the configuration file is saved, if there's ever an issue, uploading it is very easy too.

We don't have plans to increase usage at this time. We're using about 85 percent of the switch when it comes to the functionalities of what the switch does. We're at the point where we don't need to utilize it more because I designed the network to future-proof it ahead of time. Once I installed it I didn't have to change it anymore, because I knew that we were going to be getting the one-gig circuit. All of the equipment that's there is already built for a one-gig circuit. Once we get the new internet I just change the IP addresses and that's it. I won't have to touch it again.

It's helped us tremendously, in terms of the equipment, knowing that we can rely on the NETGEAR product. It will allow our customer to save a ton of money, in the long term, because we were able to remove all of the extra equipment. We were able to put in one piece of equipment, versus utilizing four different switches to run the network, switches which were bottlenecking the full network itself. It's helped us tremendously to be able to show them that we're a reliable company and that we offer great products. It does the job that we said it was going to do, and that's why I would continue using the NETGEAR product.

I would rate the M4300 a ten out of ten. Even with the issues I mentioned, it has saved me time and money, and it has saved our company money over any other switch. This switch, with the modular input of the fiber optic and the ethernet in the same switch, has saved us having to purchase extra equipment and troubleshooting that extra equipment. It's one piece of equipment, one point of access for us to go in and troubleshoot if we need to.

We're an IT services provider so we have them installed at various clients' sites, and for various applications. The primary use case is for local area networks.

We're able to pre-configure a device, before it gets deployed, in the cloud. We don't even have to open up the box, we can just preconfigure it in the cloud. As soon as we deploy it onsite, it automatically gets configured.

The most valuable feature is the fact that Insight is cloud-managed. The whole reason behind it is that there is one central place to manage it. You can pre-configure everything and you can get access to it without having to get onto the client's network. That makes it easy to use and deploy.

Remote troubleshooting is good and easy.

The remote management tools still need work. They're good, but they still need work.

One of the big drawbacks is that the whole tiered administration doesn't work. They've got a tiered user structure where there is a global admin, and then what they call a manager, and then there is a user. The problem is, if anywhere along the line somebody opens up a support ticket, all the correspondence winds up going to the global admin, it doesn't go to the person who opened up the support ticket. They can't seem to get that changed, even when you tell them specifically that the global admin is not the person dealing with this problem. That's very frustrating.

Another issue, a technical problem they can't seem to solve, is that it doesn't support multicast packets. In layman's terms, Mac computers can't print over the network.

Also, they've got some PoE models, but they need to expand that line a little bit.

Finally, it would be nice to have the ability to have SNMP enabled at the same time Net Insight. I would also like to see integration with Auvik.

It still needs some work. It's got a couple of quirks where it will shut off ports because it thinks there's an IP conflict when there really isn't.

The scalability is good. It could probably go to 100 connections. That would probably be the equivalent of 30 to 40 users.

We are a Netgear partner, so we get preferential support. Because we get preferential support, it's pretty good. We've had a few hiccups, but overall, they're good.

We were using Cisco and HPE. A big factor in our switch to NETGEAR vs Cisco Ethernet Switches is cost. Simplicity is another. Support is another because the support for HPE and Cisco is absolutely horrid.

The setup is straightforward. It's all done in the cloud and you can manage everything from there. It's a whole lot easier than the traditional way of doing it. Deployment takes an hour, if that.

The best strategy is to preconfigure it in the cloud before it gets physically deployed.

As to whether you need to be an IT expert to deploy it and support your network, it depends on the complexity of the network. For simple applications, no. For complex applications, like multiple VLANs, and QoS, and PoE power management, etc, you've got to know what you're doing to set all that up properly.

We see ROI in labor savings. Deployment time is probably cut in half. We're billing for a regular deployment, but it only takes half the amount of time. That's $200 profit for us.

There are two parts to the pricing. There's the pricing of the device itself, which is good. Their licensing model needs work, though. The licensing model doesn't fit the way MSPs do business. They need to revise it to something that makes more sense for an MSP. And here, I'm specifically talking about Insight Pro licensing.

The cost of hardware and additional service is low. That helps our business because it's easier to make a sale.

We were aware of lots of other options, but we didn't do any formal evaluation of any others.

If you are an MSP, you should definitely look into it and plan to use it. I would recommend it.

Overall, we're very happy with the product. It's become our standard going forward. But there are some exceptions. One being the tiered administration. The other one is lack of support for support multicast packets.

Regarding staff for deployment and maintenance, it depends on if you're looking at our entire fleet of these Ethernet switches, which is scattered across multiple clients; then it's probably a tenth of a person. If it's one switch, it's less than a tenth of a person. Switches are low maintenance as a device, it doesn't matter whose they are.

We've got half a dozen deployed at various clients right now. And there will be more because we've got projects in the queue.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. The issues I mentioned that still need to be resolved come to mind, as well as the licensing structure that doesn't really make sense for us.

We use them for Layer 2. We use the GSMs. We use the M4300s. We use pretty much all the Layer 2 and 3 switches. We use them for Layer 3 routers. We divide subnets up with them. The management interface isn't the best because the browsers aren't consistent, you have to use many browsers to get into them, but we use many of them: 24-port, 8-port, 16-port, 5-port. We connect them, 5 or 10-gig modules.

The ability to manage them is the big valuable feature. The ease of use is great.

It's very cost-effective. All my guys know them. They're pretty consistent across the platforms. There are some inconsistencies but, for the most part, they're pretty darn good. They are something all my guys are familiar with at this point and they work very well. They're guaranteed for life, covering all the things that you don't think about until something happens.

It is consistent and that means a lot. The interface doesn't change a lot and that's important. When you get a new management interface all the time, it makes it tough.

The management of them, itself, is not so good. You have to go between many different browsers, even some super-old browsers, to be able to do it. That is a super pain. That's critical. If this list were much longer than that, nobody would use their product.

I wouldn't be using them if they weren't stable.

It is a very scalable product.

I would give tech support a "C" or a "B." Their support is not what I would like it to be. The pre-sale support is excellent. The post-sale support is average.

I didn't have a previous solution. I've always used NETGEAR. 

The registration of the product is very easy to do. You register an upgrade code and away you go. In terms of how long deployment takes, I put one, two, three, four, or five in every office so, as a partner, I don't have a single deployment. I have a lot of different places that I have these in.

The implementation strategy is to get them cut over and back up and working as quickly as I can.

Regarding whether you need to be an IT expert to deploy and support a network, deploy: no; support: yes. Deployment would depend on the complexity of the user's network.

We do everything internally.

The return on investment for us is the replacement warranty, cut and dry. That is why it's worth its weight to me. If they have a problem, we get them cross-shipped and they're taken care of.

The price to performance of this solution is very good. When it comes to pricing, as far as I'm concerned, they're very comparable with Ubiquity. NETGEAR has pricing that is as good as it gets. That's why I use them.

Regarding licensing, there is none. You register them and they're good to go.

You have a lot of options. You always have Cisco. You had Nortel. There are many. They have a lot of competition. I'm a NETGEAR shop. I don't consider Cisco products.

I don't know of any remote management tools. Everything we manage them with is onsite.

I would give it an eight out of ten. It's the most cost-effective solution out there. The management, as I said, from a browser standpoint, is very difficult in some cases, because we have some of them that are very old and we have to bounce around between browsers to manage them.

We put them in locations that are far away from us. We're located in Indiana but we've put them is in Kansas. The solution enables us to manage it like we are actually in Kansas and we can do almost anything remotely, so that's why we deployed them there.

We're using the GC728XP, that's their 24-port Insight switch.

In terms of use and deployment, it's really easy because we have the customer set up already, so the configuration gets downloaded right away. Once you have your first customer set up, any switch that you buy for them, going forward, the setup time for that up gets cut down dramatically. Technically, we don't have the set up the switches at our office. We could just send them directly to Kansas. But we always like to double-check. It does go through a few rounds of firmware and we want to make sure that it always gets to the correct one. Sometimes customers don't realize how many times it needs to update.

What we've found is that if you give your customer access to their admin portal, even though, as a managed service provider, they're paying us to manage their equipment, the insight it gives them means they can actually see what they're paying for now. It's really user-friendly. It's very visual, so you can see what ports are being used. Visually, it's much easier for a customer to understand what they're paying for, which helps us, as a managed service provider, retain those customers. That's what we really like about it.

Another way it's helped is, let's say a network is down. Instead of my trying to talk with an end customer to get them to troubleshoot - and that's going very slowly, because they're trying to do their own job - what happens instead is that I can do it remotely and get it done maybe within an hour or so. 

Instead of

1. working with an end user for a couple of hours, and 
2. when that doesn't work, sending someone for a minimum eight-hour drive to the closest one in Kansas and as much as a 14-hour drive to the farthest - that would be almost two days where I lose a tech just driving. Then another day for them to fix the issue themselves and then the time to drive back. So, if it's the furthest location, I could lose a full week of an employee's time, instead of an hour or two troubleshooting within the portal.

Finally, the cost of the hardware and additional services is low and it helps our business because that's exactly what our customers are looking for. We can finally upgrade their old equipment and they can get something newer with all of the features that we wanted to give them and it's actually in their price range. Before, they weren't willing to upgrade their equipment because, if they want it cloud-managed, the solution was too expensive. This has helped our business to provide better service to our customers, and that's what they look for from us.

Their online portal is one of the most useful features. The portal is very user-friendly, so even someone with not a lot of tech experience can go in and see what's going on with the switch. 

The newest release, where we get to schedule firmware updates, is another extremely useful feature. The firmware updates are great for us because we can schedule them in off-hours for the business and at times where we'd rather not be physically at the office waiting for a switch to update.

Those two are the features we use most. But they have a lot of features, all the way down to port-level insight, seeing which ports are being used, what's happening. Cable Test is another one. We haven't used it that often because we haven't had a need to, but it's nice that that feature is there.

The remote troubleshooting is pretty easy. You can turn off a port that might have a network loop created, or where there might be a bad NIC which is creating issues. Being able to turn off that port remotely is fantastic, instead of having to replace the whole switch. Remote management is really easy.

They also have a great app. It's something we've had to get used to using. Most IT professionals are already on our computers and it's easy to use their computers. But the app is great and easy to use, and it has pretty much all the same functionality. Overall, it's easy, once everything is done correctly and you've gotten to the right firmware.

On a scale of one to ten, the ease of use is a nine. I'm not the most IT-literate. Technically I'm the CFO and I do tech work on the side. But it's incredibly easy. It's really straightforward. I don't know how to describe it in any other terms. It's just user-friendly, even for those with little to no tech experience. You don't need to know command lines in this user interface. It's very mouse-friendly. You can just drill down by clicking on things like ports, etc.

I don't think you need to be an IT expert to use the Insight Cloud Portal switches. It's really straightforward. They have a lot of warnings if you do something you're not supposed to, like set up a networking loop. That makes it really great for people who aren't familiar with how to support networks. If you set up a networking loop, that will take down your whole network. Even if you've caused that, it will keep your network up so you can look at the alert and find, "Oh, that's a networking loop," and unplug it and stay on track. This is really user-friendly for people new to networking or for small businesses that are trying to support themselves and that don't have internal IT. I think this would be really easy for them to use.

When they came out with the Insight Pro Edition, a lot of the MSPs were really happy because it allows us to support multiple customers in the same pane of glass. I can have different customers, and different locations under those customers, but keep them so that the customers don't see who else we support.

Their old firmware was a problem for us and we're still working on it. It didn't apply correctly so it took about half of our switches offline, which meant we couldn't use some of the functionality like the firmware updates. Unfortunately with that firmware, which they've sorted out, if you don't go through all the firmware and make sure it's past that point and back online, that's an issue. It's something to cautious about. Before you send this to a customer, make sure it's updated to the most recent firmware, otherwise you can't use the features which are the reason you bought the switch. That would be a cautionary tale. And because it's new, there are firmware updates coming pretty often.

One other issue was that we did have was one hardware malfunction where we had to replace a switch, which is unusual for NETGEAR. They have some of the best products out there for small to medium-sized businesses. They do have a warranty replacement for five years on the switches, so we got it replaced. It was a bit of an inconvenience.

So be a little cautious when buying the equipment. It is still new, it's not like the established NETGEAR switches. There might be some hardware problems in your first year.

In terms of the stability, so far so good. We've only been using it for five months. Overall, it's kept up pretty well. We just had that one hardware replacement. It's not as stable as all their other Ethernet switches because it's new and we had that one replacement, but overall it's pretty great.

It's really scalable. As I said before, if you've already had your network configured for a given customer, you're not doing any more work the second, or third, or tenth time to configure a switch if it's like every other switch. It just downloads the configuration from the cloud.

When we have problems using the interface, getting NETGEAR support is a little difficult, but once you get to the right person, they can help you sort things out. They're working on making it easier to get to the right person. They are trying to get their resellers more support and better support more quickly. There's still some room for improvement there.

I would rate tech support at six or seven out of ten. It's not terrible. NETGEAR is the premium product for small to medium-sized businesses, and they need more support than, say, a large business, which has an internal IT department that can support the user individually. So when we reach out to them, it should be easy to get someone on the phone or through chat who really understands the product. They're still trying to teach their own staff about all the different functionalities in Insight, so that's where there's a bit of a disconnect.

We've almost always used NETGEAR, we just never used their Insight product until they came out with it. We have used other switches, of course, depending on customer's needs. A cheaper one would be TP-Link, but we've found that with a little bit of a price increase, NETGEAR outperforms them every time, and NETGEAR has the lifetime warranty, which really is a huge cost savings for our customers in the long run. So we try to recommend them as much as possible.

Right now though, the Insight switches only have a five-year warranty, but that's still better than most of the other switches on the market. So you get a business-enterprise switch at a really good price, and it has this tremendous value with the warranty so that anytime the hardware fails, you'll get a replacement. That's really nice for our customers. They look for value and for savings over the long-term because most of our customers are not in the business of IT, they just need IT so that they can keep up their actual business.

Before they came out with the Insight product, if we had a customer who was really interested in that information - they wanted a cloud-managed solution - if they could afford it, they would most likely go to Meraki or Cisco route. But we deal in small to medium-sized businesses and most of them cannot afford the annual subscription that goes along with having that type of equipment.

The majority of the time, we've recommended NETGEAR for the value that they provide.

We have used TP-Link if the need is for a small switch. Before the NETGEAR Insight, we were just using the normal NETGEAR models, like the M4300. We used those quite often. We used the Cisco Meraki switches if the customer could afford it, but that's on the high end.

To set up the first five switches, took a couple hours, max. We were getting aquatinted with the new portal, so we had to set up our login credentials, but each switch took maybe ten to 20 minutes, max 30 minutes to set up. It was really straightforward.

We used the same strategy that we always do because we're always cautious with new products and want to make sure we fully understand them. We ordered the first six, set them up here, and then physically went out there and installed them ourselves. They're easier, for setup purposes, for non-tech people to use, and tech people, of course, will have no problems using this interface. Now that we have more experience, it's a lot easier to set up than the first time. We could, if we wanted to, just ship these to Kansas already configured and, if there's someone capable onsite, have that person put it in the rack for us.

For deployment, we usually have one to two people go out and run cables but, to be perfectly honest, if we weren't running cables, if we were just installing the switches, it would only take one person to configure it and put it in the rack. It wouldn't take much time at all.

We don't use an integrator or reseller because we're a managed service provider and we do all of that for our end customers. We do it from start to finish. We recommend equipment to our end user, we purchase the equipment, we configure it, and we install it. We do everything for our customers.

I think there's been a return on investment. With the firmware problem there was a little bit of an issue. If we didn't have that problem, we would have already seen a return on investment. It will be a full year before we really see a big impact on our bottom line.

NETGEAR pricing is the best on the market by far. I was shocked when I saw what their price came out as for their subscription. It's extremely reasonable.

The great thing about the Insight product is that the renewable subscription is much cheaper than the competitors in the market. It is not over $50, per year, so customers buy the equipment and don't have to worry so much about the renewable fees that go along with having such access into their switch, with a cloud-managed solution. There are some other manufacturers where you'll essentially pay the same in hardware as you do in software, just for the cloud solution that supports it; just to keep getting the firmware updates and all of that information.

With NETGEAR, you can do multi-year and that is something like 90 percent cheaper than if you're looking at Meraki, for example. It is extremely competitive. It's one of the main reasons we liked it so much. It's one of the reasons we push this so much. We want this information in the cloud and we want this insight, but we didn't want to commit our customers to such a hefty subscription fee.

We have considered Meraki. We've not used Ubiquiti that frequently. 

If you're in a small to medium-sized business, if you're a business owner, or if you're an IT company providing services to small and medium-sized businesses, this is a great solution. Seriously consider it, especially if you're looking for a cloud-managed solution that's not very expensive.

Overall, the remote management tools of the GC switch are good. There were some issues at the beginning with the initial firmware, getting it updated. We've pretty much sorted those out. This is a new product for them, so we knew that there were going to be some speed bumps but, overall, it's still better than having no easy portal to see through. The normal way you would log in to a switch is much more difficult than what they're providing.

The only thing that I didn't realize when I was setting these up is that you need to make sure that it gets to the right firmware. It doesn't get online as easily as possible, as easily as some other Ethernet switches. It does go through a few rounds of firmware updates. But everything else is really easy. Even the VLAN setup is pretty straightforward. I didn't have any issues besides that firmware. I haven't set up a new switch in a few months, so this could be a moot point. I'm just cautioning new users.

We only have one customer currently using this, with nine locations. There could be some 50 users total. They don't have a high concentration per building. We've gotten the 24 ports for all the locations, and it seems to be handling the traffic very well. We're still testing it every day, and NETGEAR has been great about working with us if we see any issues. They've been on it to get feedback addressed.

I would give it an eight out of ten. The only reason is that it is a new product. They're working out some kinks. Otherwise, in a year it's going to be the best solution out there in terms of price and value. When we first got it, they didn't even have a 52-port switch. Now they do. They're coming up with all of these additional products to give the full solution. They're coming out with a cloud-managed router as well, connecting all of those things into a full solution: they have the access points, now the switches, and the routers. That, and the consistency of the network, making sure the devices are always connected to the cloud reporting correctly, would make it a full ten. 

I know they are working on it. I was out there with NETGEAR telling them my concerns and they heard me, and I know that they've already addressed a few of those things and were just working on the last few.

We use it for the SMB market, small and mid-size businesses. In Belgium, compared to America, a small/mid-size company in Belgium has 50 to 100 people. It's a little bit different than in the U.S.

We're using mainly the GC728XP, that's a 24-port switch; and the GC752XP, that's the 84-port switch. For the smaller ones, we use the GC110P.  For the access points, we only use the WAC510.

We recently had a problem with a client, a restaurant in the city. We had installed the Insight management solution for the switches and the access points, and another solution for the router. On Sunday, a day we don't normally work, we got a call from the client that there was a problem with one of the access points and one of the switches, regarding their table-booking solution. Through the Insight app, I was able to quickly look at possible problems at the client's location. We determined that the switch that the table-booking system was connected to was down. It was offline. I told the boss of the restaurant to have look at a particular cabinet because there is one switch that's stored away beneath the point-of-sale system and the booking system. There was an adapter that was not inserted in the power plug.

It was pretty easy to determine the problem at the client's, without going to the client and having a look at it myself. It was solved in five minutes and that's something we couldn't do in the past without Insight.

Remote management is the most important thing for us. And monitoring, of course, allows us to see when something is wrong with a client. We get notified that an access point is down, for instance, or that there are too many clients on one access point, so that we can log into the portal and manage the solution with the client instantly, from either a laptop or a cell phone, with the Insight app. That's the most important feature for us.

I also find it very easy to use and deploy. I have a few colleagues who aren't so involved in technology and they can set it up pretty easily with a cell phone or with a laptop. They scan the serial number or the QR code on the device, it gets automatically assigned to a client, an Insight portal, and the configuration and firmware updates happen automatically. It's very easy to use, very easy to config. You just to put in the configuration once, and all the devices that you scan and assign to that client or that location will be updated and installed automatically.

The remote troubleshooting is easy to use, intuitive. The alerting is very clear. It's very apparent when you have an alert on a device. It comes to the foreground and it says that device has an issue and then you can directly look at the issue of the device.

The Facebook login is very important for our clients.

The main negative thing is the speed. When you use the portal, if you have a lot of customers and locations in the portal, and you need to scroll through those clients or those locations, it takes a pretty long time to load those pages and to select the client. That's the problem in the portal on the laptop, and it's the same problem in the portal on the app.

Up to now we haven't had any stability issues with the Insight application. We have been using the Pro version for the last four or five months and we haven't had any stability issues with it.

We have a restaurant here in the city that uses something like 22 access points, so it scales pretty well. I don't think there is an issue on that side. It's still a small business solution, it's not a large-enterprise solution. NETGEAR has other products for that. But for the SMB market, it's a pretty nice, scalable solution.

We did have one problem with an access point. It was defective. We sent it in and three days later we had a new product, so the tech support was really helpful. They had us do a few things and then they said, "Okay, send it in and we'll send a new one." That took three days and we had a new device. The tech support is pretty good.

We used Ubiquity. The main reason we switched was because we had a lot of defective products from Ubiquity. The main problem was that, in Belgium, there was only one year of warranty on Ubiquity products. It was not such a good deal. They're cheap. They're pretty good. We had the devices for three years and then we had something like three, four, or five defective access points, and they were all out-of-warranty. The first one that went down was one-and-a-half years old. With the one year of warranty, we couldn't do anything about it except buy a new one.

With NETGEAR hardware, we have lifetime support and lifetime trade, so I didn't see any reason not to change. They're better products, the management platform looks better than the Ubiquity Unify version. The price was good, the support as well, and, I must emphasize, the warranty is a lot better than with the Ubiquity products.

Setting up the Ethernet switches Is pretty simple and straightforward. They have a device, they create a client, they create the location in the Insight portal, they scan the device, and it gets automatically assigned to that location. Firmware updates, setup, and the configuration are automatically deployed. It's very easy to deploy a new client.

On average, for the setup and the Insight portal, deployment takes about ten to 15 minutes. In general, the deployment of a switch and, let's say, five access points, including the firmware updates and pushing the configuration, takes about an hour.

For our team, internally, we had a webinar for training. All the guys followed the webinar and they started directly with the approach of installing the Insight environment. It was all explained on the webinar from NETGEAR.

In terms of needing to be an IT expert to deploy and support the network, you do have to know something about IT. If you don't have any knowledge of IT, I don't think that you can deploy the Insight Pro - I'm not talking about the Basic or the Premium versions. For the Pro version, you do need some IT knowledge, but for the Basic or for the Premium version, no IT knowledge is necessary, because all the setup is done through the mobile app. The entire process is very, easy for the Premium. With the Pro version, you have the extended portal on the internet, and you have a lot of more features than in the Basic and Premium versions.

If you look at our customer with the restaurant, the return of investment is less than one year. You can put in these devices, have the latest software, the latest features, and especially in summer, when the restaurant has a lot of people, it's an attractive solution for doing some marketing around it. You have a good WiFi solution, and you can extend it to your guests.

Insight pricing is okay. It's very competitive.

The costs of the hardware and additional services weren't low because Unify is much cheaper, but the costs conformed to the market. When you look at the hardware specs, the price and the warranty, the complete package was much better than any other vendor. If you consider those three main aspects of NETGEAR Insight and NETGEAR Insight devices, and you put them next to Ubiquity or Cisco Meraki, or even TP-Link, in our opinion, it's better hardware, it has a better warranty, and for the price you have to pay, it's a pretty good product.

Before we went to NETGEAR, we had a look at, of course, Ubiquity; we had a look at Meraki vs NETGEAR, and we had a look at TP-Link. All together we had four in the running, and NETGEAR came out as what we thought was the best solution and, in the end, it was the best solution.

Just try it. It's a good product, it's a good solution. If you come from Ubiquity, it's a little bit different but, in the end, it's all about the devices and the reliability of the devices. With NETGEAR you get that good device reliability and you get a little cheaper price than Cisco Meraki.

As for the remote management tools, the general look and feel are okay, but the speed could be increased. That's one of the minor points of the Insight portal, is that it sometimes lacks in speed when loading certain pages for certain clients.

In general, there are about 18 to 20 internal users. For the guests it ranges from, let's say, from one to 100 or 120.

We require no staff for deployment and maintenance. With Insight, if you look at it from the standpoint of a reseller, you don't need to have one dedicated person for management of it, because it's all done on one portal, one application. When there is an alert from a device or a client, you can have a look at it, but you don't need a dedicated resource for management of the environment.

For the moment it's not necessary to increase usage. It's pretty brand new.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. They could make it a ten by making the interface faster, providing more devices to choose from to put in Insight, and by adding a few more features to the Insight portal; software features, like reporting and alerting. Those two things should be extended with extra features.