Categories

Ubiquiti TOUGHSwitch 8-Port PoE PRO TS-8-PRO Review

£999,999.00 excl. VAT

Back to Ubiquiti TOUGHSwitch 8-Port PoE PRO TS-8-PRO

Review by Steve Clark

Date Added: Tuesday 05 February, 2013

The Ubiquiti TOUGHSwitch 8 Port PoE PRO like its smaller brother is a lovely little piece of kit and with 8 port plus a management port makes it good value and 4GON do it for about the best price you can find in the UK. It comes in a relatively small chassis with a lovely textured almost rubber-feel edge buffers.

One minor irritation is it comes with a static default IP address whereas many devices these days initially are factory configured to get an IP from DHCP - I therefore had to do my initial configuration by connecting it 1 on 1 with a laptop, then changed its IP to the static IP I wanted it to have on its target LAN.

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) - I had my VLAN configuration set up in no time at all.

One other 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 in the bar of my small hotel where it is handling CCTV, EPOS and private WiFi (the CCTV and WiFi AP both being PoE) on one VLAN and a Ubiquiti Unifi PRO AP also being driven by PoE (note that ideally I'd have used it's smaller 5 port brother but that model doesn't support standard PoE at 48v)

Although it is quite a small box it is surprisingly heavy - presumably with the transformer etc to handle PoE at both standard 48 and the 24v used by the 24GHz Unifi APs - and it doesn't come with screw slots designed to be wall mounted on its side and doesn't look readily stackable.

4