Top positive review
86 people found this helpful
Perfect for resolving slow internet issues
By Kaycie Bauer on Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2020
Update in 2024: This review is originally from 2020. This little thing is still going strong and lovely. It’s been moved several times as the home network has been changing and upgrading, and it keeps going. No complaints, just keeps working. Probably the most reliable piece of tech in my home network next to the UPS units I have for the machines. The original unit serves high demand steaming/upload download on the local network (NAS + servers in a proxmox setup). I have other units that service other parts of the home, and they work great. TLDR: If you have issues with Zoom, streaming services, or just overall spotty internet connection with your WiFi, you may want to consider getting the 5 port switch (not PoE! Save yourself some money) along with some CAT 6 cables (for gigabit internet). Unmanaged works fine for just ‘plug and play’. It’s insane how much it helps! You shouldn’t have to do much besides plugging in everything and selecting the ‘Ethernet’ option on the device if it doesn’t so automatically. They’re reliable and easy to setup and use. The long story: I had purchased the PoE one at first to allow it to later be utilized for a security station if need be (or if I had something fun to play with), but I also got the unmanaged 5 port (without PoE) on accident. The one WITHOUT PoE is much smaller (3/4 the size it feels like). I would recommend the 5 or 8 port if you just have a few things you wish to plug in to it. PoE is not something you should worry about unless you know your devices require it. My household has issues with WiFi, so many devices can’t connect well enough to have an enjoyable experience. WiFi extenders, a new router, etc, did not work for us in the past (and ended up causing many issues), so we resulted to using Ethernet for our most used devices. Our internet plan is top tier for our area, so we expected better connections. Turns out we just do a whole lot of internet stuff to bog down the main router and our bandwidth! The household setup: One switch (PoE 5 port, unmanaged) is at the router since the router only offers 2 Ethernet ports. This switch services a smart TV, computer, and free cable for whatever device we decide to plug in (be a laptop or game console). It also services another switch (5 port, unmanaged) across the house. That way we only have one Ethernet cable running across the house until we can put it under the house. The second switch services a WiFi station, computer, game console, and smart TV. The computer is on 24/7 and the TV is on a majority of the day and night streaming HD movies and shows from multiple services. All of these are fairly ‘heavy’ devices on this switch, as in they are constantly downloading or uploading content all waking hours of the day. All devices are connected with CAT 7 Ethernet cables, but CAT 6 work just fine. (I would recommend CAT 6 or CAT6a since it is certified to run gigabit. CAT 7 is overkill and I do not recommend it because of price and it’s not standardized as much as the others). Results: So far everyone in the household has noticed an improvement not only with the devices plugged into the switches, but also the overall WiFi quality. Smart phones are no longer ‘dropped’, the printer remains connected, and even most laptops are seeing better speeds and responsiveness on the WiFi. My household is especially polluted with plug and play devices (such as Amazon Echos, Ring Cameras, wireless smart plugs, etc), and all of these seem more responsive now that we have gotten the ‘heavy’ loads off of the WiFi. The second switch that is piggybacking off of the first switch has no issues, and all devices are able to preform to their peak. Even though not all of them are gigabit, they seem to greatly benefit from being on Ethernet. Zoom calls are much better too. Before we could only have 1 person on zoom but now everyone can get on so long as only one person is on WiFi. The switches do not heat too much and are easily concealable, but require power. I do not recommend stuffing them into a blanket closet or among pillows though, even though it’s tempting to hide their flashing lights. Overall they have exceeded my expectations. This review will be updated in the future if any issues arise.
Top critical review
97 people found this helpful
PSA: Lockup condition where device cannot find internet or get a DHCP assigned IP address
By Harper on Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2023
I've had two of these switches working flawless for nearly five years. Recently, I had to trip the circuit breaker resulting in reboot of both switches and several computers attached to the network. At first none of the computers were able to connect to the router or get an IP address through DHCP. If you read the little "Product Information" troubleshooting guide provided on this Amazon site, it is obviously a bunch of screen shots that walk through this very problem. They go through a series of steps involving setting up static IP addresses that will result in fixing the problem, even though it is entirely couched as gathering information rather than fixing it. ***This should not be a fix*** Why is that? Network switches don't work on the IP address level, they work on MAC addresses, which are unique to each device. So playing games with the IP addresses should not solve the issue. But this switch seems to have some smart features, particularly around IGMP that appear to block some traffic based on IP address. If you look at the details of your computers ethernet device, you will see zero received packets, and the transmitted packets slowly ticking up. This is a lockup condition. The condition works like this: 1) A computer boots up and looks for an IP address from a DHCP server. For some reason it cannot reach the server (maybe the router is down) and so it assigns itself an IP address within an autogenerated IP subdomain. 2) When the router comes up, it sends out a broadcast looking for everything that can see it within a certain IP subdomain. 3) The IP subdomains of the computer and the router are mutually exclusive. When they broadcast to do network discovery, they use multicast packets local to their subdomain. The switch does not allow these multi-cast packets to cross subdomains, so the computer and the router will never find each other. All the discovery is filtered out. If you reboot the computer. It will default to the last autogenerated IP address and the switch will filter discovery. If you power cycle the switch, it will quickly relearn the autogenerated IP address and apply the filter. If you reboot the switch, same problem--separate subdomains. The condition is locked in until you manually join the two subdomains together via static IP address allocation. The troubleshooting fix is a way to manually break this loop by putting the computer in the same subdomain as the router. This is never explained in the solution, and it makes it sound like you are just doing some debugging experiments to make sure your switch isn't broken. The the link magically starts working and you breath a sigh of relief and move on with your life. My first job was designing ASICs for network switches, so I have some familiarity with the low level workings of a switch. A dumb switch will never have this problem. It doesn't look at IP addresses, subdomains, or anything. If a packet doesn't have a specific MAC address as a destination, it will propogate the packet to all ports. My guess is the IGMP snooping feature is causing this lockup condition to occur, since it says it limits the effect of multicast packets on the network. This is not a problem any home user has to deal with. If I was going to fix this from TP-Link's side, I would probably default to dumb switch operation for first 5 minutes of operation. That allows all devices to do network discovery before the IGMP snooping/multicast filtering kicks in. With that solution, you would just have to power cycle the switch and everything would magically fix itself. As it stands, you need to do some pretty complicated network surgery to fix it. No normal user should have to mess with static IP addresses. In fact, you can cause more problems if you assign an address that is already taken. And in my case, this was not an option. I had my work laptop with the network settings locked down. I spent about 8 hours total debugging, discussing, and theorizing on the problem. I spent nearly as long googling for answers--the information is just not out there.
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