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Ubiquiti TOUGHSwitch 5-Port PoE Review

£999,999.00 excl. VAT

Back to Ubiquiti TOUGHSwitch 5-Port PoE

Review by Steve Clark

Date Added: Sunday 27 January, 2013

The Ubiquiti TOUGHSwitch 5 Port PoE is a lovely little piece of kit and although slightly more expensive than obvious alternatives 4GON do it for about the best price you can find in the UK. It comes ina small and lovely textured almost rubber-feel chassis. It has a much faster and more user friendly web interface which is far less clunkier than say the Netgear Prosafe closest equivalent though to be honest you need to do next to nothing with it unless you are setting up VLANs. Using VLANs is actually a very intuitive interface with you choosing if a port is tagged untagged or unused for a given VLAN (and of course it only lets you allocate a port as Untagged to a single VLAN).

A couple of things to be aware of buried in the "small print" of the user manual is that it has a dedicated management port which is only 10/100 so really does need to be cabled as a management port if you ned the full flexibility of the 5 full 10/100/1000 ports (rather than having to have one of them on the management VLAN) i.e. you can't "cheat" and plug the uplink into the non PoE port and get one normal port and 5 PoE ports if you want proper gigabit operation. The other thing is that the PoE is only 24v (although its bigger brothers support standard 48v). This makes it only suitable really for PoE applications such as connecting to compatible UniFi Access Points ratehr than wider network application - this is a bit annoying as having seen the lovely user interface I decided to order a second to power some non Ubiquiti PoE devices rather than the closest equivalent netgear device but had to order the bigger brother instead to get the standard 48V support even though I only needed 4 ports in that application.

One last thing to mention is that the PoE is not autosensing - you have to set the voltage in the UI -and there are warnings about the risk of damaging devices if you send power to a non-PoE device, whereas Netgear and many other makes are auto-sensing, enabling you to connect spare ports with impunity to non-PoE devices.

All in all though a nice bit of kit at a pretty good price - I'm using it to drive a guest and private network in a small hotel and it compliments the rest of my UniFi Wireless Access system very well graphing the data distribution over time across the ports (and therefore my access points).

Steve

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