NETGEAR Switches Reviews

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.

More than five years.

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 use it for networking. We use the switches from NETGEAR for 10GB internet. We are using the M4300.

We implement our own solutions. We resell to clients in the audiovisual sector. We specialize in audiovisual productions, 3D animation, compositing, and the like. Our clientele is all in the same sector.

We upgraded from a previous, 1GB-only solution so it should be a lot faster but I don't have any benchmarks on it. In the past, there were some complaints from employees that the network was slow but I haven't had any more complaints about it. That's a metric, of sorts.

The most important feature is the failover, the LACP links. That's the dual set it allows. We have redundant core switches and, if one fails or one network adapter fails, the other one can take over without problems.

You have to know a bit about networking of course, but for me the ease of use is about a nine out of ten.

Less than one year.

It's very stable. I haven't had almost any issues since it was up and running. 

I had one issue with an extra WiFi deployment that I did, which caused network interruptions, but it had nothing to do with the core installation. It was just the WiFi equipment that brought down the network because of loop creation, but that had nothing to do with the main switches.

Currently, I have five Ethernet switches running. I think it scales up to eight within one stack, so that is more than enough for our purposes. Instead of going with discrete switches, which have to be managed separately, one of the big advantages of this product is that you can put it all in one stack. The whole switch stack is viewed as one big switch, which is really good for us. So it's very scalable. In the future, I could even add three more switches and I think they have a new product now that has 96 ports. It's way more scalable than we will ever need in our company.

I have not needed to contact technical support yet.

We used HPE previously. The reason I switched to NETGEAR was because of pricing differences, which are huge, when you go into 10GB networking. It was mainly a price-oriented decision. I also read a lot of positive reviews in the forum I visited, so that was another factor which made me decide to go with NETGEAR.

The setup was very straightforward. I just configured a few IP addresses, maybe a few settings on the ports, and that was it. The whole system was set up in about one hour or so. It went very smoothly.

The whole deployment was in phases. I first set up the core switches and hooked them up to the old switches and then gradually changed everybody over to the new stack. The total time was about a month, before everybody was switched over. It all went very smoothly. It could have been done in a day if nobody had to keep working. There wasn't an option to shut down the company for a complete day, so I had to do it gradually.

I planned the migration ahead of time. I calculated the time it would take to get the units here. We actually did a complete overhaul of our server room. We moved it inside of the building, so I had to switch over to the old switches to the new server room. So there was quite a lot of planning involved, mostly on the timing of when the steps would be taken. I had to do some calculations about how much time every step would take. There was quite a bit of planning, but it all went quite smoothly, so no complaints here.

I don't think anybody without knowledge of networking would be able to set up the system as I did it. Expert is a "big" word, but you have to know something about networking before you can use this kind of product.

I did everything myself. I had some help from people on a forum called Spiceworks. I contacted NETGEAR directly and they put me into contact with the Benelux departments. But I did the integrations myself. We are also a reseller of servers and networking equipment and the like. So I'm quite good at that stuff.

The price-to-performance of this solution, on a scale from one to ten, is about nine. 

The pricing is quite good. We don't have any kind of licensing on the device, as far as I know. There's one product which you can purchase a license for, it's NETGEAR Insight, to manage the switches remotely on the Internet, but we don't need it. I just manage them locally.

It helped us save some money, of course. The total cost of the deployment was about 11,000 euros or so. If I had gone with HPE it would have been at least twice as much. I think Cisco might have even been more expensive.

At the beginning, I was looking at Cisco vs NETGEAR but I didn't get any response from Cisco. I also looked at HPE, but it was a bit too expensive for a 10GB. I did a minor bit of research about their products, but it quickly became obvious that NETGEAR was the way to go for us.

I didn't consider Ubiquiti. Ubiquiti is okay for smaller deployments but, as I said, we are scaling up in the coming months to about 50 workstations, a few office machines and about ten servers, so I don't know if Ubiquiti would have been an option for us. I know they have high-end gear also, but I didn't look into it.

Just buy it. If the network is the same scale as my network, about 100 PCs and about ten to 15 servers, it's an ideal solution for that. Also, go look on Spiceworks for help. Ask for Kieran. That is somebody from NETGEAR who helped me out a lot.

I don't think anything is missing in the product. I don't think there should be any improvements.

At the moment, we have about 15 users and we will scale up in the coming months to about 50 users. In terms of deployment and maintenance, it's just me. I do everything related to IT in the company.

Everybody uses the product because it's our core switch. I think we have some overhead in regard to the number of clients that are connected at the moment. In that context, I think its usage is about 30 or 40 percent, at the moment.

We don't use the high-bandwidth AV over IP functionality.

Overall I would give it a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect. If it were perfect, I would just have to plug in some cables and the system would manage itself. Then I would call it perfect. But you still have to put some work into it, and that's normal.

• QoS
• Port trunking
• PoE+

Netgear has solid, cost-effective switches with enterprise functionality that I am very happy deploying on my network, and on SMB customer networks.

I put together a mesh configuration of GS108E and GS110TP switches for several customers to allow them to setup a full High-Availability (HA) configuration between two different ISP devices (modems/routers with only a single customer link each) so there was complete failover between each firewall and each ISP device.

The devices are easy to deploy, easy to configure, and easy to upgrade, especially with their Smart Control Center (SCC) software.

A slightly, more featureful CLI interface would be great.

I have deployed this specific config for over a year across multiple offices.

The deployment went smoothly, but we have had to revisit the overall configuration to allow remote management of the outside interfaces (for unmanned sites).

Stability has been fine.

We have not needed to scale in this config, but the other switches we are using (GS724Tv3, GS728TP) have been well able to handle our traffic.

Customer Service:

I have only had to use live customer service infrequently over the past four years.

Technical Support:

On the few occasions I have needed support, technical support has been top-notch.

This was a new deployment, based on good experiences with Netgear switches in other areas. We have replaced Dell PowerConnect switches with Netgear ones.

It was straightforward to get the devices connected to the local network, updated to the right firmware, setup with the right configuration, then get that configuration replicated to other devices (with minor changes).

I implemented it on behalf of my customers.

The project did not have a direct ROI consideration. It was implemented to reduce the labor necessary to handle various failover scenarios.

Netgear costs are very straightforward. There is very little in the way of separate licensing costs.

No, I recommended a solution based on my experiences with quality and functionality of switches in the mid-tier market.

The GS-108 switch by Netgear is an excellent solution for setting up a wired gigabit network. I currently use it at home to wire my rack-mounted server, my gaming desktop/workstation, PS3, Xbox 360, network accessible printer, along with all my Cisco routers and switches that I use for config testing. I remember I bought it on sale almost 5 years ago, and it has been ticking away ever since. Never had a single problem with it.

The only issue I have, and it's not really an issue so much as me being a control freak, is that this is an unmanaged switch. I am a DD-WRT developer and would love to have the granular control I have over my router, on this switch.

I use the GS108 8-port Gig-E switch on a daily basis, it's what runs the wired portion of my VLAN on my home network. I've also used plenty of Netgear enterprise managed switches in the past and usually rely on them as a cost-effective alternative solution to Cisco equipment. They're reliable and sturdy enough to take a beating and keep on ticking.

Net gear switches come with auto sensing Ethernet connectivity. They automatically detect 10,100 and 1000 Mbps speeds and act accordingly. They support both half and full duplex connectivity. Monitoring LED's are available for switches to enable you to identify the link, speed, and activity of a switch. The FS108 utilizes Store-and-Forward switching, which verifies the integrity of data before forwarding it across the network so that you don't waste bandwidth on junk transmissions. The Netgear FS108 is a simple, economical, path to high-speed Ethernet connectivity, giving you solid performance and running usability! No fan, means no noise, which helps maintain a peaceful atmosphere in your busy office. It also supports green technology which helps you save a lot of electricity.

If it’s generating a lot of hits, then it can hang up network. You need to reboot the switch for the network to run once again. VLAN management facility is not available on some models.

This product has a high stability standard. You can easily plug and play. Buy Netgear products to increase your network performance.

Some of the Netgear Ethernet Switches are available in the market at a low cost, so they are easily available. Moreover, setting up these switches is quite easy. Few of them are only plug and play. Netgear has both managed and unmanaged switches starting with 5 Port to 24 Port. Few series of 5 Port and 8 Port switches are quite popular in the market. There are only a few steps to configure them. 24 Port JS series provide a good amount of bandwidth with 4.8 gbps speed and a transmission rate of 200 mbps. Some of Netgear Gigabit model like GS series, QoS (Quality of Service) is configured internally and easy to install and operate. Netgear Switches are quite handy for small enterprise networks.

Though Netgear Ethernet switches are available in the market at a lower price than Cisco Switches, the ultimate market leading switches, they lag the edge of superior security features in them. Features like 802.1x protocol, IP-MAC port binding, etc. can not be easily configured in manageable switches. For larger enterprise networks, where complex VLAN environment is desired, Netgear switches do not provide the required features. There are very few products available that support Gigabit speed.

Users from small and medium networks are quite oriented with Netgear Ethernet Switches. They are easy to install and some of them can be plugged into the wall. Their low cost makes them easily affordable. These switches can be effectively utilized in a small group of VLANs. Power consumption requirement is also quite a bit less than other commercially available switches.

1. Netgear switches are relatively cheap. 2. It comes with lower power consumption. 3. Netgear switch setup is easy. 4. It also supports auto full duplex sensing with noise reduction.

Traffic management capability should have been a plus.

I bought netgear Prosafe Plus 24PORT Rack Mountable Gigabit Switch because of its unmanaged nature. It is very simple to use – as simple as plugging in your network cable. The new branch that we deployed with the switch, runs on Cat6e cable with a mixed network adapter that supports both 100Mbps and 1GBps transmission speed. We were therefore able to segregate between high bandwidth and medium users without additional cost or professional skill. With my laptop that supports gigabit transmission, I was able to download 5GB file from our server within 3mins.

The tool's price could be better. 

I have been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable. 

My company has one user for the tool. 

The solution's setup is easy. The tool's deployment depended on our vendor. 

The tool's deployment can be done in-house. 

The solution is expensive. You need to pay the costs one-time. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten.