Customer Reviews

NETGEAR Prosafe 16 Port 10/100 Desktop Switch with 8 Port Poe FS116P

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I suggest you think twice before you commit to this switch. While it's great that it's small and fanless, I've replaced the unit TWICE because it developed several 'dead' POE ports. The Ethernet function continued to work, but the POE function failed on several ports. Instead of 8 POE and 8 regular ports, I only had 6 POE and 10 regular ports.

YES, the manufacturer has a LIFETIME warranty, but they also have a $20 FEE for advance-replacements. What's the alternative to paying this fee? You can't just shut down your network for 3 weeks while you wait for the replacement! According to support there is no 'Second Generation' version that fixes the problem so I expect that the re-replacement [sic] will also fail. Too bad.

UPDATE August 2009:

As I suspected, another failure. That's three failures total in as many years. Today the power on ALL our POE devices (IP phones) began cutting being in and out. The device is LIGHTLY loaded, far below the published power rating. Furthermore the device was not blinking its POE 'overload' warning light. I was tempted to solve the problem by smashing the device with a hammer, then setting it on fire, then throwing it out the window. I suspect that the device was just improperly designed to be fanless. That is, I suspect it gets too hot, and needs a fan despite the fact that it designed as fanless.

UPDATE September 2009:

Netgear replaced it for us AGAIN, this time for free. We went ahead and paid the $20 again for advance replacement, which covered shipping both ways. However Netgear accidentally charged the credit card THREE times. After three phone calls at about 20 minutes each I finally got through to someone who was able to reverse two of the three charges. BONUS, as an act of good faith for the multiple device failures and billing error, Netgear went ahead and refunded us for ALL charges. In other words the advanced replacement ended up being completely free to us.

Naturally I'd have gladly paid the $20 not to be on the phone with them for 3x20 minutes, but I was pleased with Netgear's small gesture. Call me naive, but their small act of good faith makes me feel a little better about their intent (at least) to build reliable products. I'm slightly more hopeful that my situation is a statistical outlier.

I have been using this switch for over a year now and it has worked flawlessly without requiring any reboot (I attached it to a 500VA Tripp Lite UPS). I used it to power 4 Panasonic Poe IP cameras over CAT-6 Ethernet cables (2 of which are over 100-feet away) with zero drop outs. All four of these cameras are also outputting 640x480 30fps video simultaneously with no drop-out. Just plug in and go, setup can't be easier.

As an added bonus, it has vents on the left, right and back for ventilation to keep it cool without any fan noise.

The high point of this switch is that it's PoE but silent. Ours is powering 6 toshiba IP telephone handsets. It did have one glitch in the first week where it needed to be power cycled (indicators on the switch indicated a fault for all ports.) but since then, it's been on for two months without a problem.

The low: PoE is only available on the first 8 ports. and there is no management of this switch: no QoS, no remote monitoring, &c. I've heard the specs don't provide for full PoE wattage to each of the 8 ports either, but it's fine for 8 of our IP handsets.

We are a small business with 10 computers and a dedicated server. This enabled us to save well over a thousand dollars to hookup a couple of connections with no power supply to them. Otherwise we would have had to rewire the building. By no means am I a professional IT employee, but we found it easy to use and worked perfectly for our needs.

While its Thanksgiving morning and I have a lot to be thankful for, this Netgear switch is not one of them. Unfortuantely I have to take part of my day to return this item as its the last day I can do so. But the short story is that I got this 28 days ago and yesterday I plugged it into my clients network, right out of the box. I plug in Cisco SPA525G2 phones into ports 1,2,3,4... Then on port number 5, the Cisco phone doesn't power up. So I think maybe I over subscribed the switch, but the "MAX PoE" light isn't on and each phone only draws 1.3W when not in use! To test it out, I unplug port 5 and take the working phone in port 4 and plug it into port 5 - NOTHING! I plug it into port 6,7,8 and still nothing. Plug it back into port 4 and it works. So its confirmed, the switch shipped with 4 bad PoE ports!

I've always had great things to say about these Netgear switches, but for netgear to ship a switch with 50% bad PoE ports, says a lot for their quality control!!! Who's Q/A these products before they go out??? So the customer is left to deal with it! OK, I'll get off my soap box. BUT apparently I"m not the first customer to have this problem. So if you order it, make sure you have plenty of time to return it and get another one to meet any kind of time-line that you may have.