Huawei Ethernet Switches Reviews

I am a Huawei reseller, so I supply these switches to my customers. The use case is just for general corporate office connectivity from the desktops through to the data center.  

The feature that is the most valuable depends on who the customer is. The power of the Ethernet is important for us and for our clients. The multi-gig options are important for us all. All the routing protocols that they have are important for us. The level of importance of each of these features depends on the specific business requirements for a specific company.  

I do not know if I can think of a product feature that really needs to be improved. Especially right now, the most important thing for customers is cost and Huawei does have a very good price point. They are very competitive from a cost perspective. From a technology perspective and in my economic environment with my customers, Huawei has everything that I and the customers need.  

If I have one potential issue, it is that the technical support does not understand English so well. The issue is just that they should understand and speak English pretty well to provide proper technical support and solutions.  

I have been using Huawei switches for about a year now.  

Huawei switches are stable products.  

The scalability of the product is excellent. We do not have any real problems with the product and we are able to scale really well. I am talking about both upward scaling and linear scaling. Huawei does what it does very well.  

Being totally honest, we do have a problem with technical support and language. The technical support people are supposed to be able to understand and reply in English. Sometimes we just do not understand what they are saying or they do not understand us. So getting support from Huawei can be a little bit tricky.  

I am talking about the support teams specifically — like if I phone the service desk. Otherwise, the support is good. Their swapping process is fine. The way they release the software upgrades is all fine. They just need to be able to communicate better.  

The initial setup is straightforward. It is not an issue.  

The Huawei Ethernet Switching products are reasonably priced and competitive in the marketplace.  

I use the product, so I definitely think that I can recommend Huawei as a very good alternative to other highly-praised brands. The world does not have to just use Cisco. Huawei is very cost-effective. They have all the features. I would not have a problem recommending it to anybody.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as an eight-out-of-ten. 

The primary use case of this solution is for connections in an enterprise company.

The most valuable features are that it is easy to use, easy to configure, it's priced well, and the operating system is easy to understand.

It would be helpful to have more commands.

Technical support needs improvement.

I would like to see more training opportunities available. It is very rare to find training with quality.

I have been using the Huawei Ethernet Switches for six years.

This product is stable and I have not experienced any issues.

We can scale this solution.

I have tired to contact technical support but I was not able to connect with anyone.

Previously, I worked with Cisco. Cisco provides training every year, which is helpful.

The initial setup was easy. It took one hour to set up and deploy.

The price of Huawei ethernet switches is cheap.

This is a good product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

In terms of the most valuable features, LAN switching is more comfortable and valuable in the network. It is easy to configure and easy to deploy. It is helpful for the installation and it is easy to troubleshoot issues. It's an easy product to understand. It's a good solution. 

I had issues with patching the IOS. But right now I think Huawei has improved very much in the advanced technology and is more stable now. I think patch and bug fixes should be announced on a scheduled basis. That would eliminate the issues and improve the functionality of the device. It would be helpful. 

I have been using Huawei Ethernet Switches for five to six years. 

The stability is good. I installed the devices over two years ago and they're still running. It is a stable and reliable device.

It is scalable. 

Technical support is good. Out of ten, I would rate them seven or eight. 

I have worked with Cisco and Huawei. I have worked on both and both devices are stable and reliable devices. Cisco is a standard of devices. Huawei are valuable devices that work well. They are both sufficient and good devices.

The initial setup is very easy. I feel comfortable when I deploy and troubleshoot the device. It's easy to assess the device and understand its technology. It's very comfortable to use. 

The pricing is cheaper than other vendors, which is a plus. 

The device is stable, reliable, and cheaper as well than other devices. The features are valuable. They also have good support. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

With respect to the hardware, I think Huawei should improve its chassis. Its hardware module like the cooling system is not as good as with other devices. For example, with Cisco, I switched off a router that was running more for than five to six years, 24/7. But the amazing thing was that the device was running continuously for about five to six years. With Huawei, I haven't seen any device uptime. Maybe it is an issue with the environment because in Pakistan the environment is dusty at most of the sites. That's may be why Huawei has this issue. The dust can stack on the cooling system and that may cause device failure or something to impact the performance. Huawei should improve its hardware chassis and must focus on the cooling system with respect to the environment or a dusty environment.

Our primary use case is for peer to peer links and for the ISP. We connect end users to it and
we have over 50 users of this product. I'm a Wireless Network Design Engineer. 

I like getting that CLI syntax, it's quite similar to the Cisco product.  

There could be some improvement in the dashboards and that's something that could be included in the next update.

I've been using the solution for four or five months. 

It's a stable solution.

Scalability is quite good.

The initial setup of the solution is quite simple. 

We looked at Cisco before going with Huawei.

I would rate this product an eight out of 10.

For my own use case, I am a reseller for the switches. For my clients' use case, it is using the products as switches to build out their network connections.  

The most valuable features will be those features that are really considered as basic features of this type of switch. That includes things such as spanning tree protocol, Huawei's proprietary intelligent stacking called iStack, and the routing features that come along with the switch software package.  

Because Huawei does not charge any license fee on extra features I can repackage it. When you buy a switch from Huawei, the switches come along with a lot of features that you do not need to pay extra money for but you can use these features to build out similarly to something like Cisco switches. There are some features that it does not include, so you have to pay some extra license fee to enable those capabilities.  

To improve the ethernet switches, I think first of all that Huawei should improve their knowledge base library. When people like me are trying to look for documents to study about the product to find a solution, sometimes the particular information I am looking for is quite hard to find. It should be an easy task to find a suitable document as a reference. By comparison, it is very easy to locate the information that you need for the Cisco systems. I just type the name of any features or any questions I might have into Google and I can find what I need in a matter of minutes. With Huawei, it is not that simple.  

I think the support also needs to be improved. Right now you have to be able to speak Mandarin in order to communicate with those technical experts and express your problem to make them understand what it is. When they know they can give you a solution to solve your problem, and the support is good in that way it is good. But they need more support for other languages. When I work with Cisco, for example, you can generally speak in English. I am not saying that the support people at Huawei do not know how to communicate in English at all, but find it quite difficult to communicate well with them because they have a very heavy Mandarin accent when speaking in English. It is better to just speak with them in mandarin if you can.  

Because I work only so often with the Huawei brand, I think these might be the only suggestions I have. I spent a long time with the technology but have not gotten very deeply into discovering the smaller details of Huawei switches until recent years.  

I have been using the product for three years.  

The stability of the brand is constantly getting better and has improved over time. Early on, I actually was working with this brand and have experience with it from seven or eight years ago for a short period of time. As I worked with it, I found it was sometimes hard to explain to the customer when the system became unstable. But Huawei seems to have resolved these issues now.  

In terms of scalability, Huawei is catching up to the big brothers in networking. For example, it is doing more to compete with Cisco, i-Tree or Brocade switches. Their scalability is quite good and sometimes they develop proprietary technology similar to other brands, like borrowing from Cisco. But some people say that the brand is just trying to copycat features that already exist in other brands. To copy is good sometimes, but to develop their own new technology is more important than copying something from other companies. It is not quite best practices to steal some technology and ideas from other companies.  

I would say that the technical support responds quite well. Because we are in the same time zone, it is quite easy to find people for troubleshooting or support. Just in case they cannot solve my problem, they can look for other knowledgeable resources within the same time zone who can address the issue. Some other brands, like Cisco, will usually pass the case to another time zone. They work in a protocol which some people call "follow the sun." So sometimes when people are working in one time-zone and they pass the case to people in another time zone, there might be some problem or some information that gets lost about the dialogue explaining the issue. When that happens, you have to repeat the questions and dialogue and it can take the people responding some time to pick up what had already been explained. So it wastes time at the end of the day.  

I believe that the question about setup complexity really depends on which models of the switches are being used. For the middle to low-end switches, it is quite intuitive. But for higher-end models, you must have experience in understanding not only Huawei technology but should also have a very clear concept of what you want to accomplish in networking. So, configuration-wise, I do not personally find any difficulties in configuring Huawei switches provided that I find the configuration guide and read it briefly before I put in any commands into the switch. However, less experienced users could potentially have problems.  

Huawei comes with a lot of features out of the box that you have to pay extra for with other products. They do charge extra in the licensing for certain other features, however, so some of those capabilities are an additional charge.

I have used quite a few ethernet switches. I have mostly been involved with Cisco, Huawei, and Meraki and I primarily use these three brands. It is not really a matter of choosing only Huawei as a solution in my situation. As a reseller, I need more than one option to satisfy client needs.

The advice I would give people who are considering this product as their switching solution is that if you are looking to satisfy the needs of a small scale project and want a pretty good price, then you might go for it. But you might be sacrificing security or risking involvement in a politically unstable situation. China and the U.S. are very tense with their political positions at the moment. They are facing some sort of trade war. If you need some components to produce or manufacture a product like a Huawei switch it is possibly going to be a tense situation. The chips are an important and really a vital component to complete development and upgrades or maintenance. Without that availability, the switch cannot work properly if something happens. So security and material swapping are the major issues to consider as a potential risk of adopting the product.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate the Huawei ethernet switches as a five. I rate it a five, or really average, compared with a product like Cisco switches. Cisco switches really rate something more like an eight or eight-and-a-half.  

The primary use case for this solution is more appropriate for small businesses than bigger ones, and is for internal and distribution switches, as well as for using power apps.

The most important feature that our clients look for in this solution is that it will perform how it says it will perform for the best price and that it will provide good support.

In terms of communication, implementation, and permissioning, we have on-hand implementation documents on the website that you can download if you want some second project in certain kinds of scenarios. Huawei has the advantages here, because with Cisco I can not find it. You have to do it yourself.

Durability is fine. The performance is fine compared with other products

From the customer's perspective, they usually don't care about certain disadvantages because as a technician I am the one who deploys and configures the planning and communication for them. In my opinion, most of the basic configurations of the switches are all the same.

In terms of Huawei specifically, the availability and the speed of the firmware updates are the only things wrong with Huawei. There are some vulnerabilities on the hardware. Cisco is good with releasing the patches. For Huawei, this aspect is problematic.

I would like to see performance improved, including wi-fi flexibility.

We have been working with Huawei Ethernet Switches for about four or five years. Our customers are using it.

Our clients are mixed - small, medium and large companies.

In terms of stability, I think it is a stable product. They are six years old. I haven't seen any hardware failure.

Their scalability is good. All the competition like Huawei or Cisco have their own scalability design. You can expand it.

The technical documentation available is very good. The technical support for the customer is also good - I would give it 8 out of 10.

The initial setup is ok. I think they're all the same common lines, they're all standard configuration. Everything's fine. For me, on the technical side, I didn't find any disadvantages.

The deployment time depends on the size, plan and design of the deployment.

We usually deploy it ourselves for the customer and they will call us if anything happens.

I think Cisco has the advantage in terms of durability because they have been in existence for more than 20 years, whereas Huawei just started a few years back. Cisco has a big track record of experience, R&D, and more.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Huawei Ethernet Switches an eight. Overall, I would recommend this product.

We use it for architecture, commissioning, provisioning, installation and product shooting, reports and networking from TV, IP broadbands, networks, large networks, longer networks, DWDM systems, IPTV server, SIT Server, POYT, and also CCTV networks for security cameras.

The most valuable feature is the audit systems. I also like that it can synchronize on the alternate configuration of products together at the same time.

What I like about Huawei is that it has a very fast response to troubleshooting problems and regulates reports with very great production. Instead of other manufacturers that are pretty slow sometimes to expand. That is why I work with Huawei and not other solutions. Other manufacturers should speed up their answers.

It's a problem when you have several large networks and the problem is not at a specific point, but many different problems together. 

In the next release, I would like to see an increase in the performance of DDoS protection systems against all kinds of attack packets.

I have around 20 years of experience using Ethernet Switches. 

In terms of stability, I think this is the best on the market. 

I contact two places for support, Romania and China. I don't only use support for troubleshooting but also for conception and networks. I don't have any trouble with them.

I would rate it a 9.5 out of ten. Not a ten because the life span of the solution is too short. 

We use the on-premises model for our internet company. We only use it for that situation.

The velocity of the process is the most valuable feature. 

Integration could be improved. The price could also be lower.

The solution is stable.

Huawei Switches are scalable. We have ten people that work on this solution, including engineers and other personnel.

Their technical support is very good, although I haven't been in touch with them directly yet.

The initial setup was straightforward. It took us one month to deploy this ourselves.

We have a one-year license. There are no additional costs besides the licensing fee.

The stability is good. I also find value in the recollecting the materials.

I would rate the switches as eight out of ten. Not a ten mainly because of the price.