NETGEAR Switches Reviews

The primary use case for this switch was for when we were involving the more intensive AV over IP stuff, specifically the SDVoE products that NETGEAR has partnered with. The reason that we picked them over competitors was knowing that they were one of the founding partners of the SDVoE Alliance, which gave us a lot of assurances that the product would work well in this type of deployment. 

In our experience, any type of AV over IP stuff has always been plagued with some sort of network hiccuping, and there is always a big learning curve. Therefore, knowing that NETGEAR specifically worked with the SDVoE Alliance to make it work, this gave us a lot of confidence going into this project.

The use case was for a high school's distributed audio/video system. So, it ran audio/video in multiple gymnasiums, gathering spaces, and small collaboration rooms.

The reason that we went with SDVoE is the amount of sources and destinations were high enough, where if we were ever going to do it over traditional HDBaseT or some type of matrix switcher, then it would've been some crazy card loaded thing and I would've had to mix copper and fiber. It was enough that if we had to get into a 32x32 matrix switch, and at that price point, I was like, "This is silly, let's just go AV over IP, then we have no limitations or concerns with our inputs and outputs. We also have no risk of them adding a thirty-third input, then throwing out that switch and having to buy a whole new one."

In this specific case that we've used it for, we replaced a video matrix switch with it. The original design from the bid was to use a big 32x32 matrix switch. We decided that since we are doing a bunch of other network stuff here as well, in terms of control and audio, why don't we do audio, video, and everything over IP, putting everything on the same switch. So, instead of having 14 different devices to manage, I have five. It worked out really well in the long run.

We use M4300-96X and M4300 48-Port PoE 1Gb switches. At the moment, we are just using this with one customer.

If our company was going to buy a new office and deploy a bunch of stuff, it would be one of these switches that I would purchase, especially because you're able to stack different models and types, then manage it nice and easily. I could see, as a network administrator, the ability to look at your entire network from one page and have the ability to diagnose and fix problems in one area. That would be fantastic.

The primary use case is for Pro AV products, so multicast video and multicast audio passing across an AV system. Audio video is getting very network-based, so we are using it for network transport and multiple VLAN communication.

We work with a large variety of project sizes. This solution has come in to help our company in the mid-project size range, where you have a customer who needs two or three switches but doesn't have the budget for an enterprise grade switch that is $10,000 to $20,000. The NETGEAR product line fits great in that medium project size where you need to have some of those enterprise capabilities, or a switch with a bit more power behind it, but you don't necessarily have a huge budget. At the same time, it can also scale up to those large projects. 

A few of our projects have used NETGEAR switches as a core for video walls where we do a lot of Crestron NVX, which is a multicast video transport. They have used the NETGEAR switch as a core to pass that traffic over to a video wall with multiple streams. In most of our projects, we'll do one to two switches. The flexibility with the M4300 is they have anything from a smaller 12 to 24 port switch up to a chassis based 96 port switch. In our large projects, we typically go for the chassis based switch, which has up to 96 ports. That covers everything we need. Normally, there are one to two switches in different projects.

We're using 10 Gigabit switching in a limited respect for interswitch communication. That is our primary use case for 10 Gigabit or larger connectivity where essentially we have multiple switches connected to each other and need to pass multicast video or audio from one switch to another. We do have a few products out there that are using that for multicast video transport. From a switch perspective, it's been very positive and stable. Some of the other products have had issues, but that's not related to NETGEAR. They are passing on the high bandwidth traffic without any issues.

As an engineering company who pioneered network-based AV solutions, we strongly rely on our in-house network backbone. It is fundamental for all required AV protocols, as well as for all of the standard network purposes which our company uses.

In our case, SDVoE, Dante (professional audio), office traffic, etc. flow on different VLANs which are incorporated into one single physical network infrastructure. Divided over two racks, three switches from the 4300 series are running in stacked mode and provide 10GbE connections to the SDVoE encoders and decoders from ZeeVee, as well as to all our other gear, including Dante devices, computers, access points, and phones.

With the NETGEAR 4300 series switches, we have been able to test, demonstrate, and provide training on the ZeeVee 10GbE SDVoE gear, which we distribute.

Thanks to the availability of 10GbE, we have been able to show the difference between compressed 4K video streaming over 1GbE and uncompressed 4K video streaming with the use of the SDVoE protocol and 10GbE.

However, 10GbE is Ethernet in another speed. We had to learn how to handle it. This knowledge will be useful in future projects. For example, one of our upcoming projects will have 24 encoders and 11 decoders with two M4300-96X NETGEAR switches.

I'm using them for network switching for SMB. The Insight line is the SMB line, that's what they're trying to break into with this line. I've used them at a country club and at a restaurant, both of which have VLANs. We're using them at our office. I've got them in about eight different locations now, in different environments.

It has saved a lot of time. I haven't tried exporting out the configuration and then importing it into another one, so traditional switches might give you a little bit more that way because you can export out the configs (You can now export out configurations). The web management through one pane of glass for all of my NETGEAR switches has made it a lot easier. It makes it easy to compare settings from other sites when you're trying to duplicate what you've done in the past. You can look at it real quick - without having to remote all the way into a machine, and then try and get into the switch, and remember the IP address of the switch and the credentials of the switch. It's all right there for you. I have a single login for all of my switches.

The cloud management has been huge for us. We have 80 clients and they all have switches. We've been migrating them over as much as we can, when it's called for, to the cloud-managed Insight ones. On those sites, we know more information without having to do complicated SNMP traps. We get nice emails, we get a web interface, and we're not having to wait for our RMM tools to get SNMP traffic to notify us. We don't have to do complicated configurations. It's all just part of the simple setup, of joining the switch to an account.

AV over IP: Sending video and audio over the network. We use this solution as part of commercial AV large format displays, video walls, and high-capacity HD real-time displays and monitoring.

In most applications, we are only using a couple of switches. Primarily, they are trunched. We have switches in different locations. E.g., we will have an endpoint inside of a classroom or with devices directly connected, but also with a main switching infrastructure and IDF. That is one of our use cases. 

Another use case is in our medical environment with some of the 10 Gigabit applications. We will have switches remotely located in an IDF in a data closet where we will have fiber run back to those switches. We have just one per operating room, but then we will have lags in-between switches in order to pass video from one switch to another in the event that we need to share video to other systems.

We primarily have been using it in testing. It has been implemented by our audio-visual group on two projects now with the Crestron NVX AV over IP solution. One of those projects used two switches connected, and those have been stacked for port count. Then, the other implementation was just a single standalone switch.

That the switches can save a configuration or even import a configuration via CLI is largely beneficial. It's similar to our current workflow with Cisco switches, so it doesn't require much of a curve as far as implementing those features or implementing a configuration that way. It is straightforward.

The ability to use the web interfaces is a big plus. For implementation, our company can quickly update firmware and not having to worry about licensing, which is a big deal. That's a big difference from some of the Cisco products as well as the Extreme products that for specific features require licensing. Not having that with the NETGEAR product is great. This aids us tremendously, as a company, to roll out these switches on multiple projects.

This particular unit controls all of the fiber optics coming in from each of our buildings for the property that we are managing.

At this particular facility, what they had was a Cisco router coming in, and then a gigabit switch. That switch went out to these 10 x 100 fiber optic switches, which were outdated. That bottlenecked the whole network at the network room, and then it went out to a media converter, and then to a gigabit switch, and then it went out to the clients' routers inside their homes. It was a pretty complex network.

The idea was to find the right product so I could eliminate all of those extra pieces and devices and the troubleshooting that went with them, and pare it down to only two pieces of equipment. The right equipment was the NETGEAR M4300-96X. It allowed me to be able to troubleshoot much quicker. It allowed the operations to be very seamless.

As far as remoting into it goes, it is very efficient because I can do it from anywhere, through the remote software. I can get right into it, I can change settings really quickly, if a customer needs to add another device into it or if I need to make changes on the VLANs which we created.

Another great function of this particular switch is that we have roughly 100-plus VLANs running through it and it's never had an issue. No hiccups, nothing. It just works like a well-oiled machine. It has saved us a lot of time and money and it allows our customers to be more efficient and save money too.

We are a collaboration in AV design and integration company. The primary use for switches in our organization is anything AV related, control, streaming media, audio, collaboration, etc.

Our company is only commercial. We don't do any type of residential services. Our company only deals in commercial. I personally only deal with those larger projects. We use NETGEAR switches with video wall applications, for high intensity, high bandwidth streaming applications, and in mission-critical situations. The amount of switches and displays depends on the size of the project. I just designed one that had five switches recently, but the amount can range depending on the size of the project and building. While it depends on the size of the project, NETGEAR's stuff is scalable to use with any size project.

We don't necessarily have users in our company because we sell the solution. We have multiple clients throughout the country that we put the solution in based on their AV needs.

We are using the M4300 platform.

We have been able to standardize on a few of the major vendors. This has increased our efficiencies. We have been able to provide configurations on switches that we recommend. It's an easier configuration or setup process for our guys out in the field who are installing this stuff. Thus, we have been able to standardize on a grouping of switches, which helps speed up the process with our testing, quality control, and installation out in the field.

Netgear is the only switch manufacturer with a marketing push into the AV marketplace. They are the only major manufacturer out there who is testing and looking at what the AV requirements are as far as streaming capabilities, high bandwidth, and some of the stuff with new AV technology. They are designing switches to better support this.

NETGEAR is our distribution switch for our local area network. We have about 80 data hosts connected to our network. They go through another set of switches into this distribution switch. From there they connect to our gateway and to our servers.

The switches are on our premise and there's no special software other than that it's just a network switch.

It has improved my organization because now the entire network is quicker. A lot of users tell me that things seem faster but they can't really elaborate. My guess is everything is just a fraction of a second quicker going through the network and that adds up at the end of the day.