NETGEAR Switches Reviews

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.

We use the switches for our clients. We're an IT services company. We set them up for our clients when they need networks built or when they upgrade networks or adjust network infrastructure. We switched over to the Insight product line.

We use the GC510 and GC510P, which is the Power over Ethernet model. We also use the GC728X and 728XPs, and the 752Xs and 752XPs.

It is very easy to use. They give you the ability within the screens to make changes and you can push them down to all the devices at once. It's saving us a lot of time in terms of making changes on our customers' equipment by making changes at the organizational level and just pushing a button to push them down to the equipment.

Using the Insight product line and the Insight Pro interface has reduced the amount of time that my organization needs to spend on two things:

1. Setting up the equipment. By having it all configured in the system and being able to push down the configurations to all the devices at once, we've saved at least 50 percent of the time we would spend setting up new equipment for our customers. 
2. The other piece where we've saved a huge amount of time is in maintenance. For the networking equipment we used previous to Insight, you would have to log on to the equipment and push up the firmwares that had the security fixes in them, and do it manually. By using the Insight product line, we can schedule the firmware updates for all the equipment at the same time or at different times, but we can have it all automated and that's easily saving us six to ten hours of labor per customer per quarter.

Two of the most important features are the ease of monitoring and setup. The setup is a breeze with the Insight switches and monitoring of the Ethernet switches for our clients through, in our case, the Insight Pro account, is also a breeze.

NETGEAR has made it really easy to deploy these devices because you just put in the serial number and the system dials home and finds the right account to be attached to. I can set up and preconfigure everything for my client in the Insight Pro interface, put the serial numbers in, so when we bring these things online, they can go home, they can get their configuration, they check in, and do all that stuff automatically.

And through the Insight product line, you can push the settings down to all your Insight devices. For example, we have one client that has three Insight switches and when we make a change to their network - for example, we have to add a VLAN for whatever purpose within the organization - we can make the configuration change and push it down to all three switches at once. We don't have to individually log on to each switch to make the change.

I really love the remote management as well. One of the biggest benefits of the remote management is that it's easy to use and you can use it from a mobile device or tablet with the app they've developed. I have technicians and engineers who work for me and support my customers. If one of my engineers is out in the field at a client and an alert comes in from another client, that engineer can take that alert and look at it in real-time using the app on his phone. He can figure out what might be the problem and actually even solve the problem without the issue having to be transferred back to the main office to have someone else address it.

The remote troubleshooting features provide a single pane of glass where I can see my all my clients' equipment. If they're reporting a problem, I can go to the Insight Pro interface online and I can bring up that client and I can see all their devices and the status of all their devices. I can start to dive into it and look at, "Okay, what's the throughput on this switch?" I can then quickly identify, "Well, there's something attached to this switch that's causing a flooding of the network," for example. I can then actually identify which port it is and then address it quickly.

One area that has room for improvement, and I know NETGEAR is working on it, is adding more features to the product lines in terms of what we can manage through the Insight portal. There are certain features that we can turn on and push down to all the devices, but not all Layer 2 or Layer 3 settings are there yet. NETGEAR is working on that, but one of the things that is not 100 percent is the feature set that they make available through the Insight interface.

One to three years.

We have not seen any problems with it. It seems very stable. We're getting alerts when things are going wrong, so it's not like we're missing anything. My impression is that NETGEAR has a very stable platform in the Insight product line.

They have a very scalable product line. They offer quite the range of networking devices and equipment. Between their Ethernet switches, their access points, and their firewalls, they've got a veritable range within each of those product categories that can meet my needs and, I would assume, the needs of our customers, anywhere from enterprise level down to the mom and pop shop.

Their support has been very good. Any time we've had an issue, which has been minimal, they've been very responsive and things have been resolved within 24 hours, tops. Usually, most of the stuff gets resolved on the initial call.

Previously, we used different equipment. I switched to them because they not only have the Insight product line saved us a lot of time, but it's also very cost-effective compared to other solutions out there. I believe that from a dollar value perspective, the Insight product line is an excellent product line. You get lots of features for the price that you're paying and you don't get that kind of feature-density-per-dollar with any other product line out there.

The initial setup is straightforward. We create an Insight Pro account, which is pretty straightforward, and then add my engineers to the account so they have access to all the customer's stuff. Adding a new client into our Insight Pro account is very easy. So setting up the whole Insight infrastructure that we use to manage and monitor all the Insight devices on behalf of our clients is a breeze. 

As far as setting up the equipment goes, I mentioned earlier that they dial home automatically and then we can push configuration information down to all the devices at once, so it's definitely a breeze to set up multiple devices.

The deployment time on average for the customers where we've used this equipment is on the order of one hour. Previously it would take us anywhere from six to eight hours to preconfigure things, test them, and push it out.

In terms of our implementation strategy, we get the equipment in-house and we bring the equipment online for the customer in our lab. We preconfigure everything and set it all up and verify that the configurations are all working. In the past, that could take anywhere from six to eight hours to do. It included downloading firmwares, uploading them one at a time to each switch, setting the VLAN settings or the Layer 2 or Layer 3 settings on each switch individually, then connecting them all together, and making sure they were all working. With the Insight product line, it takes an hour or less because we plug it in, they dial home, we do the configuration to the cloud, push it down to all the equipment, and then we can see immediately if it's all working properly through the Insight interface.

If you wanted to deploy this type of equipment without IT expertise, I'd say you could do it. The reason you could do it is that, the way the Insight products are set up with the portal interface, they make it very easy to identify the features that you want and to turn them on or off without necessarily understanding how to get into the switches themselves and make those changes on the switches.

Everything was done internally.

The return on the investment, in switching to Insight, is that my staff needs less time to manage those devices, compared to the previous devices that were there. My staff has been able to go out and do more work, take on additional products. It has also freed them up to do things like some additional education and training and to improve their skill sets, which makes our whole organization better.

The pricing for what you get with the Insight product line is very fair and the value is there, including the annual licensing fees for the Insight Pro for each device. The pricing is very fair for the features that you get. In fact, I believe that the Insight Pro level, which is their highest level, where you get a lot of features with the Insight, is a bargain. You get a lot of good features for what you're paying there annually.

I feel that the pricing for the devices and licensing is low and, obviously, it helps the business because I was able to upgrade to the Insight product line and get better, newer, more modern equipment at a very reasonable price. I was able to take some money that was saved from a budgeting perspective and spend it elsewhere within the organization to improve other aspects of the business.

I looked at Cisco Meraki vs NETGEAR, and Ubiquiti as well. I ended up choosing NETGEAR because of the cost, the quality, and the ease of use. Insight makes it easy. I know Meraki is Insight-like: you plug them in, they dial home and you can set it up, but Meraki is very expensive compared to NETGEAR. I also looked at HPE switches.

Definitely consider the Insight product line, but make sure that you understand what you're getting and that you're getting the right piece of equipment within the Insight product line. Consider getting that licensing so that you can manage it online.

The number of users in our organization is about 25. In terms of their roles, there are financial folks who are using it for the organization, there are service people who are using it, and the executives are obviously on the system and using it as well.

For deployment and maintenance, as far as staff goes, I don't even need a full-time person for it. Their role is just to do the configuration: Set up the devices per the design that was done for the network and then maintain it. The maintenance is just monitoring it and then fixing anything that might come up. I don't need full-time people to do that.

Insight is, today, about 15 percent of the equipment on the infrastructure. My plan is to actually get it to 100 percent. My intention is to take it all the way and have everything Insight-based.

• 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.