TP-Link TL-SG105-M2 | 5 Port Multi-Gigabit Unmanaged Network Switch, Ethernet Splitter | 2.5G Bandwidth | Plug & Play | Desktop/Wall-Mount | Fanless Metal Design | Limited Lifetime Protection

Product Information

Along with its 8-port sibling - the TL-SG108-M2 - the TL-SG105-M2 is low-profile, easy to set up, and features a fanless design and metal enclosure that will keep it as quiet as it is fast. And because it’s a 2.5 GbE switch, you might not need to buy new cabling; as long as you’re already using Cat 5e cabling in your network, you’re good to take advantage of the 802.3bz network protocol, which promises 2.5 GbE or 5 GbE connections over 100 meters of cable. In testing, this bore out, with super fast file transfers that didn’t even blink when we loaded the network down with as much traffic as we could muster. The switch ran a little warm though, topping out at about 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ethernet Cables: My rooms have Jadaol flat Cat-6 cables that range in length from 1-foot to 25-feet, all worked with 2.5 gigabit. My home had professionally-installed Cat-6 in-wall cabling, with some cable lengths up to 40 feet long, all worked with 2.5 gigabit. When you set up the switch box you use one of the 8 ports to take the Ethernet cable from the router and use on-line. They had been using the Wi-Fi but it is slow and unreliable, in our household, and bandwidth was at a premium. I decided to buy a switch so all the friends could tap into the TP-Link switch and use the fiber optics I was able to run an Ethernet cable from one room, from the cable router, and set the switch box under my TVor Yellow) and activity indicators for each port. The box sits just under the edge of my TV set for easy access. It not a web-based graphical interface (GUI) but a software interface on this particular model (TL-SG108E). The I would list all the features and benefits of this switch but most of them mean little to nothing to me. A network Tested throughput extensively using iperf3 on the local network, and speedtest.net for Internet speed. Was worried whether my investment would actually get close to 2.5 gigabit, especially switch-to-switch, but they did! Two TP-Link switches are linked with a 40-foot in-wall Cat-6 cable, and computers can get 2.3 gigabit between the two switches.

In between 8-and-16-port switches, you have some funky units like this ZyXel XGS1010-12. It’s billed on the box as a desktop switch with 8 gigabit ports and four bonus ports in the form of two 2.5 GbE and two 10 GbE SFT+ uplink ports. The latter fiber Internet customers would recognize as the data port on a fiber ONT (Optical Network Terminator -- think of it like a Fiber modem for customers without last-mile copper).LAN (local network) bandwidth tests reliably 2.3 gigabit average between two computers. Same speed when 2 computers are on the same switch, and when they are connected switch-to-switch. This was a HUGE improvement over a gigabit network which maxed out at about 0.95 gigabits. the other 7 ports as outputs. Each of the 8 Ethernet ports are Auto-negotiating. That means you do nothing but