NETGEAR Switches Reviews

We use the switches for our clients. We're an IT services company. We set them up for our clients when they need networks built or when they upgrade networks or adjust network infrastructure. We switched over to the Insight product line.

We use the GC510 and GC510P, which is the Power over Ethernet model. We also use the GC728X and 728XPs, and the 752Xs and 752XPs.

It is very easy to use. They give you the ability within the screens to make changes and you can push them down to all the devices at once. It's saving us a lot of time in terms of making changes on our customers' equipment by making changes at the organizational level and just pushing a button to push them down to the equipment.

Using the Insight product line and the Insight Pro interface has reduced the amount of time that my organization needs to spend on two things:

1. Setting up the equipment. By having it all configured in the system and being able to push down the configurations to all the devices at once, we've saved at least 50 percent of the time we would spend setting up new equipment for our customers. 
2. The other piece where we've saved a huge amount of time is in maintenance. For the networking equipment we used previous to Insight, you would have to log on to the equipment and push up the firmwares that had the security fixes in them, and do it manually. By using the Insight product line, we can schedule the firmware updates for all the equipment at the same time or at different times, but we can have it all automated and that's easily saving us six to ten hours of labor per customer per quarter.

Two of the most important features are the ease of monitoring and setup. The setup is a breeze with the Insight switches and monitoring of the Ethernet switches for our clients through, in our case, the Insight Pro account, is also a breeze.

NETGEAR has made it really easy to deploy these devices because you just put in the serial number and the system dials home and finds the right account to be attached to. I can set up and preconfigure everything for my client in the Insight Pro interface, put the serial numbers in, so when we bring these things online, they can go home, they can get their configuration, they check in, and do all that stuff automatically.

And through the Insight product line, you can push the settings down to all your Insight devices. For example, we have one client that has three Insight switches and when we make a change to their network - for example, we have to add a VLAN for whatever purpose within the organization - we can make the configuration change and push it down to all three switches at once. We don't have to individually log on to each switch to make the change.

I really love the remote management as well. One of the biggest benefits of the remote management is that it's easy to use and you can use it from a mobile device or tablet with the app they've developed. I have technicians and engineers who work for me and support my customers. If one of my engineers is out in the field at a client and an alert comes in from another client, that engineer can take that alert and look at it in real-time using the app on his phone. He can figure out what might be the problem and actually even solve the problem without the issue having to be transferred back to the main office to have someone else address it.

The remote troubleshooting features provide a single pane of glass where I can see my all my clients' equipment. If they're reporting a problem, I can go to the Insight Pro interface online and I can bring up that client and I can see all their devices and the status of all their devices. I can start to dive into it and look at, "Okay, what's the throughput on this switch?" I can then quickly identify, "Well, there's something attached to this switch that's causing a flooding of the network," for example. I can then actually identify which port it is and then address it quickly.

One area that has room for improvement, and I know NETGEAR is working on it, is adding more features to the product lines in terms of what we can manage through the Insight portal. There are certain features that we can turn on and push down to all the devices, but not all Layer 2 or Layer 3 settings are there yet. NETGEAR is working on that, but one of the things that is not 100 percent is the feature set that they make available through the Insight interface.

We have not seen any problems with it. It seems very stable. We're getting alerts when things are going wrong, so it's not like we're missing anything. My impression is that NETGEAR has a very stable platform in the Insight product line.

They have a very scalable product line. They offer quite the range of networking devices and equipment. Between their Ethernet switches, their access points, and their firewalls, they've got a veritable range within each of those product categories that can meet my needs and, I would assume, the needs of our customers, anywhere from enterprise level down to the mom and pop shop.

Their support has been very good. Any time we've had an issue, which has been minimal, they've been very responsive and things have been resolved within 24 hours, tops. Usually, most of the stuff gets resolved on the initial call.

Previously, we used different equipment. I switched to them because they not only have the Insight product line saved us a lot of time, but it's also very cost-effective compared to other solutions out there. I believe that from a dollar value perspective, the Insight product line is an excellent product line. You get lots of features for the price that you're paying and you don't get that kind of feature-density-per-dollar with any other product line out there.

The initial setup is straightforward. We create an Insight Pro account, which is pretty straightforward, and then add my engineers to the account so they have access to all the customer's stuff. Adding a new client into our Insight Pro account is very easy. So setting up the whole Insight infrastructure that we use to manage and monitor all the Insight devices on behalf of our clients is a breeze. 

As far as setting up the equipment goes, I mentioned earlier that they dial home automatically and then we can push configuration information down to all the devices at once, so it's definitely a breeze to set up multiple devices.

The deployment time on average for the customers where we've used this equipment is on the order of one hour. Previously it would take us anywhere from six to eight hours to preconfigure things, test them, and push it out.

In terms of our implementation strategy, we get the equipment in-house and we bring the equipment online for the customer in our lab. We preconfigure everything and set it all up and verify that the configurations are all working. In the past, that could take anywhere from six to eight hours to do. It included downloading firmwares, uploading them one at a time to each switch, setting the VLAN settings or the Layer 2 or Layer 3 settings on each switch individually, then connecting them all together, and making sure they were all working. With the Insight product line, it takes an hour or less because we plug it in, they dial home, we do the configuration to the cloud, push it down to all the equipment, and then we can see immediately if it's all working properly through the Insight interface.

If you wanted to deploy this type of equipment without IT expertise, I'd say you could do it. The reason you could do it is that, the way the Insight products are set up with the portal interface, they make it very easy to identify the features that you want and to turn them on or off without necessarily understanding how to get into the switches themselves and make those changes on the switches.

Everything was done internally.

The return on the investment, in switching to Insight, is that my staff needs less time to manage those devices, compared to the previous devices that were there. My staff has been able to go out and do more work, take on additional products. It has also freed them up to do things like some additional education and training and to improve their skill sets, which makes our whole organization better.

The pricing for what you get with the Insight product line is very fair and the value is there, including the annual licensing fees for the Insight Pro for each device. The pricing is very fair for the features that you get. In fact, I believe that the Insight Pro level, which is their highest level, where you get a lot of features with the Insight, is a bargain. You get a lot of good features for what you're paying there annually.

I feel that the pricing for the devices and licensing is low and, obviously, it helps the business because I was able to upgrade to the Insight product line and get better, newer, more modern equipment at a very reasonable price. I was able to take some money that was saved from a budgeting perspective and spend it elsewhere within the organization to improve other aspects of the business.

I looked at Cisco Meraki vs NETGEAR, and Ubiquiti as well. I ended up choosing NETGEAR because of the cost, the quality, and the ease of use. Insight makes it easy. I know Meraki is Insight-like: you plug them in, they dial home and you can set it up, but Meraki is very expensive compared to NETGEAR. I also looked at HPE switches.

Definitely consider the Insight product line, but make sure that you understand what you're getting and that you're getting the right piece of equipment within the Insight product line. Consider getting that licensing so that you can manage it online.

The number of users in our organization is about 25. In terms of their roles, there are financial folks who are using it for the organization, there are service people who are using it, and the executives are obviously on the system and using it as well.

For deployment and maintenance, as far as staff goes, I don't even need a full-time person for it. Their role is just to do the configuration: Set up the devices per the design that was done for the network and then maintain it. The maintenance is just monitoring it and then fixing anything that might come up. I don't need full-time people to do that.

Insight is, today, about 15 percent of the equipment on the infrastructure. My plan is to actually get it to 100 percent. My intention is to take it all the way and have everything Insight-based.

We use them for AV-over-IP, meaning devices that transport multimedia bits and packages across the network. We use about 5,000 switches a year and we use them all over the place. We'll use them on a video wall. We don't use a matrix router anymore. We'll run and operate AV through switches for distribution.

We're using the ProSAFE and we're using the M4300's and the M4500's.

We're seeing a 35 to 40 percent cost drop and, so far, we don't have any returns or any RMAs. No flaws.

The High Bandwidth AV-over-IP functionality of these switches has been fantastic, especially in leaf-and-spine. We've been able to build redundancy and they seem to outperform even the Cisco Catalyst, which is about twice as expensive as the M-series switches are.

The price-to-performance for the M4300s is phenomenal. It's the best-on-market.

We also like the ease of set up. The setup on them takes less than 15 minutes. They're fantastic. On a scale of one to five, the ease of use is a five.

The warranty rates a four or five out of five. It's a good warranty. We don't have any problems with the product, so we don't think about it.

It looks like they're going to come up with an auto-config, so if it's a slightly different switch, when you plug them together they will auto-recognize each other.

Also, if they could come up with ways to look at metrics on it while the video is capping through the system, that would be nice. There could be some interesting uses for that, but it's a long way off.

We started transitioning to NETGEAR Switches seriously about seven months ago. It's gone really well. We're very limited in what we'll recommend and choose for our clients to build their systems with.

We haven't had one failure.

Scalability? Love it. It was very cleverly designed in terms of the output ports and being able to plug it into a 10 Gb and be able to leaf-and-spine a system. I have not run out of capacity for any of the stuff I've been building.

When customers want to add on to their systems, to add on a switch, we can definitely add one on because the system is expandable.

We've used technical support a couple of times and they're very helpful to our guys in getting things set up.

Our customers primarily switch from Cisco to NETGEAR. It's just a better switch for the same cost for small business: the 350s and 550s. I would even say that NETGEAR can now outperform a Catalyst on an AV transport.

It's very straightforward to set them up. You put them into a system and you connect all your devices to them. Every system has a switch.

You don't need to be an IT expert to deploy and support your networks. We're plugging in devices on pre-configured switches. The switches are pre-configured to work within the environment that we're putting them in. Because of the low maintenance in setup, it's really easy to send our technician-level out for installation. As a matter of fact, we can install most of the items directly out-of-box, without even setting them up.

For deployment and maintenance we require one person per job, usually a technician.

The pricing is great. The cost of the hardware is low. I think it would be bad for NETGEAR to start going down the road of a licensing model. We want a one-time, upfront cost.

They're not the lowest cost. There are a few solutions that have a lower cost, but NETGEAR is very value-oriented. If you're not considering NETGEAR switches, you're throwing money out the window right now. There's nothing on the market like it.

I'm familiar with many other solutions: Extreme, Luxul, Cisco, Aruba, and Dell, and none of them even come close to NETGEAR.

The others don't have IGMP Plus, that's exclusive in NETGEAR. And balancing PIM nodes and all that other stuff on a large network is a pain. It doesn't work that well. NETGEAR even has functions that the other switches just don't have.

With IGMP the querier is not necessarily equal on all switches. And the amount of buffer that NETGEAR has feels like it could take on twice the amount of the bandwidth that we're placing on it. It just feels like the NETGEAR switch was made to do AV multicasting, instead of trying to fit AV multicasting on a network switch. It feels like it was designed the other way around.

We put them in locations that are far away from us. We're located in Indiana but we've put them is in Kansas. The solution enables us to manage it like we are actually in Kansas and we can do almost anything remotely, so that's why we deployed them there.

We're using the GC728XP, that's their 24-port Insight switch.

In terms of use and deployment, it's really easy because we have the customer set up already, so the configuration gets downloaded right away. Once you have your first customer set up, any switch that you buy for them, going forward, the setup time for that up gets cut down dramatically. Technically, we don't have the set up the switches at our office. We could just send them directly to Kansas. But we always like to double-check. It does go through a few rounds of firmware and we want to make sure that it always gets to the correct one. Sometimes customers don't realize how many times it needs to update.

What we've found is that if you give your customer access to their admin portal, even though, as a managed service provider, they're paying us to manage their equipment, the insight it gives them means they can actually see what they're paying for now. It's really user-friendly. It's very visual, so you can see what ports are being used. Visually, it's much easier for a customer to understand what they're paying for, which helps us, as a managed service provider, retain those customers. That's what we really like about it.

Another way it's helped is, let's say a network is down. Instead of my trying to talk with an end customer to get them to troubleshoot - and that's going very slowly, because they're trying to do their own job - what happens instead is that I can do it remotely and get it done maybe within an hour or so. 

Instead of

1. working with an end user for a couple of hours, and 
2. when that doesn't work, sending someone for a minimum eight-hour drive to the closest one in Kansas and as much as a 14-hour drive to the farthest - that would be almost two days where I lose a tech just driving. Then another day for them to fix the issue themselves and then the time to drive back. So, if it's the furthest location, I could lose a full week of an employee's time, instead of an hour or two troubleshooting within the portal.

Finally, the cost of the hardware and additional services is low and it helps our business because that's exactly what our customers are looking for. We can finally upgrade their old equipment and they can get something newer with all of the features that we wanted to give them and it's actually in their price range. Before, they weren't willing to upgrade their equipment because, if they want it cloud-managed, the solution was too expensive. This has helped our business to provide better service to our customers, and that's what they look for from us.

Their online portal is one of the most useful features. The portal is very user-friendly, so even someone with not a lot of tech experience can go in and see what's going on with the switch. 

The newest release, where we get to schedule firmware updates, is another extremely useful feature. The firmware updates are great for us because we can schedule them in off-hours for the business and at times where we'd rather not be physically at the office waiting for a switch to update.

Those two are the features we use most. But they have a lot of features, all the way down to port-level insight, seeing which ports are being used, what's happening. Cable Test is another one. We haven't used it that often because we haven't had a need to, but it's nice that that feature is there.

The remote troubleshooting is pretty easy. You can turn off a port that might have a network loop created, or where there might be a bad NIC which is creating issues. Being able to turn off that port remotely is fantastic, instead of having to replace the whole switch. Remote management is really easy.

They also have a great app. It's something we've had to get used to using. Most IT professionals are already on our computers and it's easy to use their computers. But the app is great and easy to use, and it has pretty much all the same functionality. Overall, it's easy, once everything is done correctly and you've gotten to the right firmware.

On a scale of one to ten, the ease of use is a nine. I'm not the most IT-literate. Technically I'm the CFO and I do tech work on the side. But it's incredibly easy. It's really straightforward. I don't know how to describe it in any other terms. It's just user-friendly, even for those with little to no tech experience. You don't need to know command lines in this user interface. It's very mouse-friendly. You can just drill down by clicking on things like ports, etc.

I don't think you need to be an IT expert to use the Insight Cloud Portal switches. It's really straightforward. They have a lot of warnings if you do something you're not supposed to, like set up a networking loop. That makes it really great for people who aren't familiar with how to support networks. If you set up a networking loop, that will take down your whole network. Even if you've caused that, it will keep your network up so you can look at the alert and find, "Oh, that's a networking loop," and unplug it and stay on track. This is really user-friendly for people new to networking or for small businesses that are trying to support themselves and that don't have internal IT. I think this would be really easy for them to use.

When they came out with the Insight Pro Edition, a lot of the MSPs were really happy because it allows us to support multiple customers in the same pane of glass. I can have different customers, and different locations under those customers, but keep them so that the customers don't see who else we support.

Their old firmware was a problem for us and we're still working on it. It didn't apply correctly so it took about half of our switches offline, which meant we couldn't use some of the functionality like the firmware updates. Unfortunately with that firmware, which they've sorted out, if you don't go through all the firmware and make sure it's past that point and back online, that's an issue. It's something to cautious about. Before you send this to a customer, make sure it's updated to the most recent firmware, otherwise you can't use the features which are the reason you bought the switch. That would be a cautionary tale. And because it's new, there are firmware updates coming pretty often.

One other issue was that we did have was one hardware malfunction where we had to replace a switch, which is unusual for NETGEAR. They have some of the best products out there for small to medium-sized businesses. They do have a warranty replacement for five years on the switches, so we got it replaced. It was a bit of an inconvenience.

So be a little cautious when buying the equipment. It is still new, it's not like the established NETGEAR switches. There might be some hardware problems in your first year.

In terms of the stability, so far so good. We've only been using it for five months. Overall, it's kept up pretty well. We just had that one hardware replacement. It's not as stable as all their other Ethernet switches because it's new and we had that one replacement, but overall it's pretty great.

It's really scalable. As I said before, if you've already had your network configured for a given customer, you're not doing any more work the second, or third, or tenth time to configure a switch if it's like every other switch. It just downloads the configuration from the cloud.

When we have problems using the interface, getting NETGEAR support is a little difficult, but once you get to the right person, they can help you sort things out. They're working on making it easier to get to the right person. They are trying to get their resellers more support and better support more quickly. There's still some room for improvement there.

I would rate tech support at six or seven out of ten. It's not terrible. NETGEAR is the premium product for small to medium-sized businesses, and they need more support than, say, a large business, which has an internal IT department that can support the user individually. So when we reach out to them, it should be easy to get someone on the phone or through chat who really understands the product. They're still trying to teach their own staff about all the different functionalities in Insight, so that's where there's a bit of a disconnect.

We've almost always used NETGEAR, we just never used their Insight product until they came out with it. We have used other switches, of course, depending on customer's needs. A cheaper one would be TP-Link, but we've found that with a little bit of a price increase, NETGEAR outperforms them every time, and NETGEAR has the lifetime warranty, which really is a huge cost savings for our customers in the long run. So we try to recommend them as much as possible.

Right now though, the Insight switches only have a five-year warranty, but that's still better than most of the other switches on the market. So you get a business-enterprise switch at a really good price, and it has this tremendous value with the warranty so that anytime the hardware fails, you'll get a replacement. That's really nice for our customers. They look for value and for savings over the long-term because most of our customers are not in the business of IT, they just need IT so that they can keep up their actual business.

Before they came out with the Insight product, if we had a customer who was really interested in that information - they wanted a cloud-managed solution - if they could afford it, they would most likely go to Meraki or Cisco route. But we deal in small to medium-sized businesses and most of them cannot afford the annual subscription that goes along with having that type of equipment.

The majority of the time, we've recommended NETGEAR for the value that they provide.

We have used TP-Link if the need is for a small switch. Before the NETGEAR Insight, we were just using the normal NETGEAR models, like the M4300. We used those quite often. We used the Cisco Meraki switches if the customer could afford it, but that's on the high end.

To set up the first five switches, took a couple hours, max. We were getting aquatinted with the new portal, so we had to set up our login credentials, but each switch took maybe ten to 20 minutes, max 30 minutes to set up. It was really straightforward.

We used the same strategy that we always do because we're always cautious with new products and want to make sure we fully understand them. We ordered the first six, set them up here, and then physically went out there and installed them ourselves. They're easier, for setup purposes, for non-tech people to use, and tech people, of course, will have no problems using this interface. Now that we have more experience, it's a lot easier to set up than the first time. We could, if we wanted to, just ship these to Kansas already configured and, if there's someone capable onsite, have that person put it in the rack for us.

For deployment, we usually have one to two people go out and run cables but, to be perfectly honest, if we weren't running cables, if we were just installing the switches, it would only take one person to configure it and put it in the rack. It wouldn't take much time at all.

We don't use an integrator or reseller because we're a managed service provider and we do all of that for our end customers. We do it from start to finish. We recommend equipment to our end user, we purchase the equipment, we configure it, and we install it. We do everything for our customers.

I think there's been a return on investment. With the firmware problem there was a little bit of an issue. If we didn't have that problem, we would have already seen a return on investment. It will be a full year before we really see a big impact on our bottom line.

NETGEAR pricing is the best on the market by far. I was shocked when I saw what their price came out as for their subscription. It's extremely reasonable.

The great thing about the Insight product is that the renewable subscription is much cheaper than the competitors in the market. It is not over $50, per year, so customers buy the equipment and don't have to worry so much about the renewable fees that go along with having such access into their switch, with a cloud-managed solution. There are some other manufacturers where you'll essentially pay the same in hardware as you do in software, just for the cloud solution that supports it; just to keep getting the firmware updates and all of that information.

With NETGEAR, you can do multi-year and that is something like 90 percent cheaper than if you're looking at Meraki, for example. It is extremely competitive. It's one of the main reasons we liked it so much. It's one of the reasons we push this so much. We want this information in the cloud and we want this insight, but we didn't want to commit our customers to such a hefty subscription fee.

We have considered Meraki. We've not used Ubiquiti that frequently. 

If you're in a small to medium-sized business, if you're a business owner, or if you're an IT company providing services to small and medium-sized businesses, this is a great solution. Seriously consider it, especially if you're looking for a cloud-managed solution that's not very expensive.

Overall, the remote management tools of the GC switch are good. There were some issues at the beginning with the initial firmware, getting it updated. We've pretty much sorted those out. This is a new product for them, so we knew that there were going to be some speed bumps but, overall, it's still better than having no easy portal to see through. The normal way you would log in to a switch is much more difficult than what they're providing.

The only thing that I didn't realize when I was setting these up is that you need to make sure that it gets to the right firmware. It doesn't get online as easily as possible, as easily as some other Ethernet switches. It does go through a few rounds of firmware updates. But everything else is really easy. Even the VLAN setup is pretty straightforward. I didn't have any issues besides that firmware. I haven't set up a new switch in a few months, so this could be a moot point. I'm just cautioning new users.

We only have one customer currently using this, with nine locations. There could be some 50 users total. They don't have a high concentration per building. We've gotten the 24 ports for all the locations, and it seems to be handling the traffic very well. We're still testing it every day, and NETGEAR has been great about working with us if we see any issues. They've been on it to get feedback addressed.

I would give it an eight out of ten. The only reason is that it is a new product. They're working out some kinks. Otherwise, in a year it's going to be the best solution out there in terms of price and value. When we first got it, they didn't even have a 52-port switch. Now they do. They're coming up with all of these additional products to give the full solution. They're coming out with a cloud-managed router as well, connecting all of those things into a full solution: they have the access points, now the switches, and the routers. That, and the consistency of the network, making sure the devices are always connected to the cloud reporting correctly, would make it a full ten. 

I know they are working on it. I was out there with NETGEAR telling them my concerns and they heard me, and I know that they've already addressed a few of those things and were just working on the last few.

We're an audio-visual systems integrator so our main use case is supporting AV systems. The main reason we're focusing on NETGEAR is for AV over IP solutions.

The environment that it's deployed in depends on the system or the solution that the customer is looking for. It could be as simple as just a single switch that has multiple hosts attached to it, or it could be a more complex system that has multiple rooms where all of the room switches would connect back to a central core switch.

We use NETGEAR for our customers' solutions. We don't have it deployed internally yet so there aren't actually that many people in our company who are using it on a day-to-day basis. They just configure it and get it set up and installed at the customer's site.

The out-of-the-box IGMP functionality has improved our organization because it is such a time-saver for our technicians. It means they don't have to worry about the extra setup that most other manufacturers require on their switches. They're able to just power them on and to plug in and start configuring the AV devices, rather than worrying about configuring the network. Organizationally, that saves us a lot of time on how we deliver projects.

The most valuable feature is definitely the fully functional IGMP snooping and querier, out-of-the-box, that the switch provides. With most if not all switches that we've worked with previously, at a minimum you have to enable a couple of different options. With some switches there are several things that you have to enable. It can be cumbersome for AV techs who don't have much experience working with switches to configure those things, and difficult for them to troubleshoot. It's really a good feature to have that stuff enabled and fully functional out-of-the-box so that they don't have to worry about configuring any of that stuff.

Overall, the switch is very easy to use. Because they have the IGMP fully enabled out-of-the-box, in most cases an AV technician won't even need to configure anything on the switch. But in the event that they do need to configure it, their switches have a really nicely laid out, consistent web user interface that I think is pretty intuitive and easy to use.

The AV over IP works great as long, as the network is configured correctly. If you don't have the IGMP querier and snooping set up correctly, you can very easily flood the network to the point where it becomes unusable. Also, especially when you use multiple switches, you have to be very aware of how much bandwidth you need to connect the switches together.

The SDVoE also works great. It's just another type of AV over IP, so again, as long as you have all of the multicast stuff set up correctly, and the appropriate bandwidth between switches if you're using multiple switches, it works great. SDVoE is very easy to use. You get all of the value of being able to put AV on the network and all of the flexibility of it. So far it's been pretty easy for us.

And the warranty is one of the most compelling aspects of the NETGEAR switches. Other manufacturers would charge a lot of money for the exact same warranty that is included in the price of the switch with NETGEAR.

One thing I have asked for, something that NETGEAR lacks that I would love to see — and from what I understand it's in the works — is a REST API to programmatically interface with multiple switches. That would be a great feature.

We got this switch about six months ago.

The stability has been great. I haven't experienced any issues.

The scalability is another aspect of the NETGEAR platform that we find very compelling. The M4300, on its own, isn't super-scalable, although the M4300-96X is pretty scalable. But when you combine those with their 100 GB switches, it becomes extremely scalable and you can make very large systems.

Technical support is excellent. I've only actually had to contact them once, and the one time that I did they were a pleasure to deal with.

Before using the NETGEAR switches we used Cisco Catalyst and their SG small business series, as well as Extreme and Luxul. We still offer Cisco and Extreme, specifically when our clients request them.

We went with NETGEAR because somebody from NETGEAR reached out to our director of engineering to set up a meeting. That was when they were first pushing into the pro-AV space. Our director of engineering brought me into that meeting. When they laid out the functionality of their switches and the price point, with maintenance included, we thought it was a great fit for the solutions that we sell.

There are two things that jump out at me as differences between NETGEAR and Cisco The first is the price. The NETGEAR switches that have all of the features that we need are significantly lower in price than Cisco. And again, the maintenance is included for free, whereas maintenance has a pretty hefty price tag associated with it with Cisco. The second is that NETGEAR is putting an increased focus on supporting the AV integrator market, and that's something that we take a lot of advantage of.

If you're deploying a single switch it can be done in a matter of minutes. You just take it out of the box, put it in a rack, and power it on.

Once you start adding multiple NETGEAR switches, it's not any more or less complex than doing so with other manufacturers' switches. You have to follow basic guidelines for making sure the VLANs are consistent across the switches and making sure that the interconnectivity between the switches has been configured correctly.

Our standard implementation strategy, when going into a new deployment, is that we have a set of base VLANs that we normally configure on the switches, and then a standard strategy of how we interconnect our switches. We try to replicate that as much as possible on each job. 

It takes just one good network engineer for deployment, at least for the network part of it, including configuration. And similarly, it takes just one for maintenance.

If you're deploying a single switch, you definitely don't need to be an IT expert to deploy it. To monitor it and troubleshoot it you do need to have some amount of IT knowledge, but I don't know that you'd need to be an expert.

The systems work reliably, and they work well, so that's a good return on investment.

The price-to-performance of the solution is very good. You get very high performance for a low cost per port. Compared to standard AV switching, NETGEAR is probably the best value out there.

My advice would be: Don't be afraid to look at manufacturers who aren't the big names in networking. You can find switches that will meet your needs without having to pay a premium for it.

What I've learned from using this solution is that it's possible to provide great features in a network switch without having to pay a ton of money for it.

The 10 GB switching is something that we're starting to see more and more of, especially as the costs keep coming down. In our company specifically, we actually do a lot more of 1 GB than 10 GB. The 1 GB AV over IP solutions are primarily what we're delivering to customers. We haven't much need to use the 10 GB solutions.

We use the switch as part of commercial AV large format displays, video walls, and high-capacity HD real-time displays. I don't honestly know, off the top of my head, what the number of displays would be. I typically just handle the network side of things so I'm not sure how large those installations have gotten. But once you move past having a single switch and you go to multiple switches, it does start to get increasingly complex to properly configure the network, as does the troubleshooting if the need arises.

They do offer a network monitoring tool that we plan on looking into more. We just recently got it set up and installed. That is the next thing that we'll be looking into, to see how much we can utilize it.

I would rate NETGEAR a nine out of 10. Once they get that REST API rolled out then it will be a 10.

I'm using the switches in small business environments and I'm using them with the cloud management. That way, I can get notifications when there are problems without even being on site, and I can also manage them remotely.

The improvement is that, if there's an issue, I don't have to go onsite to look into it. It saves time, which translates to money. If I'm on the road for any significant time, my clients are going to get trip charges. My being able to remotely manage it means they can save those costs, and it could be back up more quickly because it might be something minor that I can remotely resolve.

The cloud management is the reason I switched to them, although the regular NETGEAR product line that I've used would be less expensive. I love the cloud management feature.`

They are easy to use and deploy. The deployment can be done through the direct interface of the device or through the cloud management if that mode is selected. But it's nice, if there is an issue, to be able to go in through the remote. The fact that the remote doesn't require a static IP - even though most small businesses do have static IPs, you do run into some that don't - is nice. They initiate the contact to the outside world, without requiring a static to get in.

The switch has been really easy. Anybody who has been in the business can hop on there and change stuff right away.

I've used and sold NETGEAR stuff for a long time and I was really excited about the cloud product. But, there are some design issues on which they really missed the boat. The problem has to do with rack mounting them because the lights and jacks should all be on the front, and the power on the back. The way they did it makes it really difficult to use them in a rack environment, because when the lights are on the opposite side of the jacks. They just don't lend themselves to a rack environment.

I'm absolutely amazed that they did what they did because they've been building switches for years and this totally violates all of the design parameters on all their other products. You can't have a device that's expected to go into a rack environment - and they ship with the rack mount - yet the jacks are on one side, and all the indicator lights you need to look at are on the back. You usually can't see the back side of a rack. You can't get back there to see, so it's just crazy. It's like they designed it to hang on a wall, rather than to be mounted in a rack. They're really missing their bigger opportunity by doing that. It's so bad that I have to consider whether or not to use them. What good are indicators if you can't look at them? And you can't do so in the current design because they're on the back side.

If you look at their entire product line, nothing is like that. It just makes no sense at all. If they would put the power on the back and the indicators on the front, it would be like every other switch they manufacture, and it would resolve all those issues. 

I want to use it. I just hope that they fix their design.

Another issue, when it comes to NETGEAR's competitors, is that other companies are offering the cloud management at no extra charge, whereas NETGEAR charges for it. You have to pay per-device for licenses.

I haven't had any issues with the stability. I just learned about the cloud model a few months ago and the first ones I rolled out were shortly after that.

In the size of environments I've worked with, it's been working great. For example, I had one where, in some parts of the building they've got some of the 8-ports, and in other locations, they've got the 24-ports and 48-ports. The product line is there. I've interconnected them using the 10-gig cross-connects for the 24s and 48s. It's the 24- and 48-port models that have a 10-gig SPF connection option. That's really nice because you get high performance between devices.

I haven't needed to contact technical support.

I was using NETGEAR's switches prior. The Insight is the newer product line. Their sales department contacted me when I first expressed interest in the product and they had one of their sales engineers do a webinar with me, showing me the product and the management.

I ended up going with NETGEAR because I've used their switches for a number of years. I've been around forever. 3Com was the original big company doing all of the switch technology. They didn't even have switches when I started. It was all hub technology back then. 3Com, obviously, was bought out by HP, so I used the HP line. I was introduced to the NETGEAR product line through another company that I partner with on jobs. They do the phone side, I do the data side. Because of IT voice technology, they had been using the NETGEARs. They introduced me to them and I liked them. They were a better price point. They were reliable. So I switched to NETGEAR. When I saw the advertisements for the Insight and the cloud management, it drew me into checking them out.

The concept of cloud management is great. If you could get one vendor that can cover all of the products, so you don't have multiple management windows, it would be nice. That's what I'm trying to do with NETGEAR, if they can just make some more improvements to the product.

I find the initial setup pretty straightforward. But again, I've worked on many pieces of equipment for 30 years, so it's easy for me.

You could deploy a switch instantly. You're not required to set any settings. You could just plug it in and use it. Somebody who doesn't know anything could use it. But if you want to take advantage of the management features, then it'll take a little bit longer. You'll have to set it up in either stand alone or Cloud managed mode and then configure it. But doesn't take long if you know what you're doing. It can be set up within ten minutes.

Most people in the business already know what their network structure is, so they know their IP subnets, etc. It's your option to throw your address on it or let DHCP assign it and then set up a couple things and you're done.

In terms of an implementation strategy, for my managed equipment I will always put a statically assigned address on it within the internal subnets of the company. That way, I'm not dependent upon DHCP being up and running at the time those devices reboot. On a typical network, all of the statics are documented, so I can pull up documentation to manage stuff. Of course, with the cloud management it gives you the ability to name the devices, so you can make descriptive names.

It takes one person to deploy and maintain it. I'm in an environment where I'm working with companies that don't have an IT staff. They're smaller than the size that can accommodate a full-time staff person. So, I'm the one supporting them.

Determining ROI gets tough when you get into some of these more expensive devices. Part of the problem is that it's a newer product line, so they don't have as many options as they will probably have in a couple years. Because there are fewer, there is a tendency to have more full-featured things that cost more, when you may not need all of the features.

The savings from the customer's perspective are when I can work on it remotely, without having to travel to their site. They're saving the trip charges and they can, potentially, be up quicker. That's going to save the customer money. The initial costs are more, but they can reap the benefits in the long term.

NETGEAR is not competitive when it comes to cloud management because Ubiquity is free. Peplink is free but you have to keep the device under warranty. After its initial warranty is up, you have to buy the extended warranty to keep it under cloud management. In that situation, the $10 a year on a router would be cheaper than keeping the device under warranty. But when you get into the access points in Ubiquity, they've got NETGEAR beat because it's free for that service. It's part of buying the product.

NETGEAR's new product is definitely more expensive than their standard product line. It's a new product line for them, so I'm hoping with the maturity of the product that those costs will come down. The standard product line is considerably cheaper. I'm not quite sure why, because there's not that much on the tech side. It really doesn't cost any more to build a managed device than it does to build a non-managed. That's usually all just in software implementations. Cloud-managed is going to be the mainstay. Everybody's going to go there. It's a matter of time until that's just the standard and everybody will expect everything to work in that environment.

Ubiquity is the one that's doing the free cloud management. I had been using some of their access points toward the concept of trying to get into unified management rather than all these different brands. I've been trying to do that with NETGEAR, with their access points, Ethernet switches, and routers. I'm just finding limitations, or it's not competitive if I have to pay $10 a year per device to manage the NETGEAR when Ubiquity will do it for free. It's part of the benefit of you buying their product. Ten bucks a year isn't much until you start having 20 devices at a company. Then it's an extra $200 that you have to get them to pay, when it's free with the other guy's product.

In terms of advice to someone who is looking into implementing this solution, I would have to know more about what their application was and what they were doing. It is going to cost them more and, if they're rack mounting it, there's definitely a negative on the switches; a big negative, because you can't see the lights.

Some aspects of the remote management tools are good and some need improvement. If you go to the new NETGEAR Insight router, there are features that aren't supported through the cloud management and you have to do them locally. That needs to be improved so that all of those features can be done through the cloud management. I'm using the version where they sell the license for $10 a year. It gives you access to control them. It's just the ability to go in and remote-manage whatever the feature set of the device is remotely, and get notifications when there's a problem on the network.

I've probably only put in ten of them so far. I've more used it for monitoring and initial setup. I haven't done much troubleshooting because they've been up and running. I haven't had the problem of them being down.

As for whether you need to be an IT expert to deploy and maintain the solution, it's tough for somebody like me, who has 30 years of IT experience, to make that judgment. For somebody who has never touched one, if you don't have those concepts, you wouldn't know what to do. You have to have a certain level. Somebody who has never done anything in technology isn't going to hop on there and know what to do, but it's not a problem with the switch, it's because they don't understand the technology.

In the first organization I implemented the solution in, there are about 40 devices on that network. There are four switches there.

I love the concept, I want to continue to use it. But I'm torn on this issue of whether or not they're going to correct the physical layout so that the lights are on the correct side.

In terms of how I rate it, I'm going to have to hit it, because it has the design flaw. Even though I'm using it, I'd throw it down at a three out ten, because it is really bad that the status lights can't be seen from the front. It's a major flaw. They anticipate rack mount, it comes with the rack mount kit. I can't believe it shipped; that it was designed that way. If that was resolved I'd probably throw it up around an eight. If they got rid of the fees for the management, I'd probably give them a nine or a ten. They have to look at the marketplace. They're not being competitive by charging the $10 per device for management.

I like NETGEAR as a company. I'm hoping that they will actually pay attention to the feedback and make changes to improve the product.

We use it for the SMB market, small and mid-size businesses. In Belgium, compared to America, a small/mid-size company in Belgium has 50 to 100 people. It's a little bit different than in the U.S.

We're using mainly the GC728XP, that's a 24-port switch; and the GC752XP, that's the 84-port switch. For the smaller ones, we use the GC110P.  For the access points, we only use the WAC510.

We recently had a problem with a client, a restaurant in the city. We had installed the Insight management solution for the switches and the access points, and another solution for the router. On Sunday, a day we don't normally work, we got a call from the client that there was a problem with one of the access points and one of the switches, regarding their table-booking solution. Through the Insight app, I was able to quickly look at possible problems at the client's location. We determined that the switch that the table-booking system was connected to was down. It was offline. I told the boss of the restaurant to have look at a particular cabinet because there is one switch that's stored away beneath the point-of-sale system and the booking system. There was an adapter that was not inserted in the power plug.

It was pretty easy to determine the problem at the client's, without going to the client and having a look at it myself. It was solved in five minutes and that's something we couldn't do in the past without Insight.

Remote management is the most important thing for us. And monitoring, of course, allows us to see when something is wrong with a client. We get notified that an access point is down, for instance, or that there are too many clients on one access point, so that we can log into the portal and manage the solution with the client instantly, from either a laptop or a cell phone, with the Insight app. That's the most important feature for us.

I also find it very easy to use and deploy. I have a few colleagues who aren't so involved in technology and they can set it up pretty easily with a cell phone or with a laptop. They scan the serial number or the QR code on the device, it gets automatically assigned to a client, an Insight portal, and the configuration and firmware updates happen automatically. It's very easy to use, very easy to config. You just to put in the configuration once, and all the devices that you scan and assign to that client or that location will be updated and installed automatically.

The remote troubleshooting is easy to use, intuitive. The alerting is very clear. It's very apparent when you have an alert on a device. It comes to the foreground and it says that device has an issue and then you can directly look at the issue of the device.

The Facebook login is very important for our clients.

The main negative thing is the speed. When you use the portal, if you have a lot of customers and locations in the portal, and you need to scroll through those clients or those locations, it takes a pretty long time to load those pages and to select the client. That's the problem in the portal on the laptop, and it's the same problem in the portal on the app.

Up to now we haven't had any stability issues with the Insight application. We have been using the Pro version for the last four or five months and we haven't had any stability issues with it.

We have a restaurant here in the city that uses something like 22 access points, so it scales pretty well. I don't think there is an issue on that side. It's still a small business solution, it's not a large-enterprise solution. NETGEAR has other products for that. But for the SMB market, it's a pretty nice, scalable solution.

We did have one problem with an access point. It was defective. We sent it in and three days later we had a new product, so the tech support was really helpful. They had us do a few things and then they said, "Okay, send it in and we'll send a new one." That took three days and we had a new device. The tech support is pretty good.

We used Ubiquity. The main reason we switched was because we had a lot of defective products from Ubiquity. The main problem was that, in Belgium, there was only one year of warranty on Ubiquity products. It was not such a good deal. They're cheap. They're pretty good. We had the devices for three years and then we had something like three, four, or five defective access points, and they were all out-of-warranty. The first one that went down was one-and-a-half years old. With the one year of warranty, we couldn't do anything about it except buy a new one.

With NETGEAR hardware, we have lifetime support and lifetime trade, so I didn't see any reason not to change. They're better products, the management platform looks better than the Ubiquity Unify version. The price was good, the support as well, and, I must emphasize, the warranty is a lot better than with the Ubiquity products.

Setting up the Ethernet switches Is pretty simple and straightforward. They have a device, they create a client, they create the location in the Insight portal, they scan the device, and it gets automatically assigned to that location. Firmware updates, setup, and the configuration are automatically deployed. It's very easy to deploy a new client.

On average, for the setup and the Insight portal, deployment takes about ten to 15 minutes. In general, the deployment of a switch and, let's say, five access points, including the firmware updates and pushing the configuration, takes about an hour.

For our team, internally, we had a webinar for training. All the guys followed the webinar and they started directly with the approach of installing the Insight environment. It was all explained on the webinar from NETGEAR.

In terms of needing to be an IT expert to deploy and support the network, you do have to know something about IT. If you don't have any knowledge of IT, I don't think that you can deploy the Insight Pro - I'm not talking about the Basic or the Premium versions. For the Pro version, you do need some IT knowledge, but for the Basic or for the Premium version, no IT knowledge is necessary, because all the setup is done through the mobile app. The entire process is very, easy for the Premium. With the Pro version, you have the extended portal on the internet, and you have a lot of more features than in the Basic and Premium versions.

If you look at our customer with the restaurant, the return of investment is less than one year. You can put in these devices, have the latest software, the latest features, and especially in summer, when the restaurant has a lot of people, it's an attractive solution for doing some marketing around it. You have a good WiFi solution, and you can extend it to your guests.

Insight pricing is okay. It's very competitive.

The costs of the hardware and additional services weren't low because Unify is much cheaper, but the costs conformed to the market. When you look at the hardware specs, the price and the warranty, the complete package was much better than any other vendor. If you consider those three main aspects of NETGEAR Insight and NETGEAR Insight devices, and you put them next to Ubiquity or Cisco Meraki, or even TP-Link, in our opinion, it's better hardware, it has a better warranty, and for the price you have to pay, it's a pretty good product.

Before we went to NETGEAR, we had a look at, of course, Ubiquity; we had a look at Meraki vs NETGEAR, and we had a look at TP-Link. All together we had four in the running, and NETGEAR came out as what we thought was the best solution and, in the end, it was the best solution.

Just try it. It's a good product, it's a good solution. If you come from Ubiquity, it's a little bit different but, in the end, it's all about the devices and the reliability of the devices. With NETGEAR you get that good device reliability and you get a little cheaper price than Cisco Meraki.

As for the remote management tools, the general look and feel are okay, but the speed could be increased. That's one of the minor points of the Insight portal, is that it sometimes lacks in speed when loading certain pages for certain clients.

In general, there are about 18 to 20 internal users. For the guests it ranges from, let's say, from one to 100 or 120.

We require no staff for deployment and maintenance. With Insight, if you look at it from the standpoint of a reseller, you don't need to have one dedicated person for management of it, because it's all done on one portal, one application. When there is an alert from a device or a client, you can have a look at it, but you don't need a dedicated resource for management of the environment.

For the moment it's not necessary to increase usage. It's pretty brand new.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. They could make it a ten by making the interface faster, providing more devices to choose from to put in Insight, and by adding a few more features to the Insight portal; software features, like reporting and alerting. Those two things should be extended with extra features.

I use the solution in my company for just our internal networks.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it works properly. From the moment the product was plugged into our company's environment, it has worked properly without bothering us. The technical people just plugged it in and took care of the setup of firewalls and routers, and everything worked. Most of such tools are often simple to plug in and get working. I haven't dealt we haven't dealt with any unreliable stuff with the tool.

My company just bought all the stuff, plugged it in, and started to work, after which we never had to think about it.

The tool does not offer extra firewall security. The product already has firewalls in it, but I believe that something can always be improved and can prove to be useful for users. The tool should offer extra firewall security.

The product should try to remain competitive in the market and needs to work on offering more firewall security since it is considered to be a never-ending aspect when it comes to such solutions.

I have been using NETGEAR Switches for ten years. I am a user of the solution.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. I have not faced any issues with the product whatsoever.

If my company bought a switch with a 24-port, there is nothing we can do with it if we run out of it, and all we can do is get another one since it is easy to change. There has never been an issue with the tool. You just get the right size in the first instance, if possible.

The tool inherently is not scalable, so any questions associated with its scalability do not apply to it. When you buy a 24-port switch, you should know that it is not designed to be scaled up.

I have experience with some other brands. NETGEAR Switches and other products are all the same.

The product's initial setup phase is easy. The deployment process has always been easy for routers or switches available in the market. I haven't found any difficult deployments. I am not an expert in deployments since my company has technical people to deal with the deployment area, so it has been an easy process.

One person can deploy the solution.

The solution can be deployed in 15 to 20 minutes.

You just need to plug it in, and it will start working. The product has been on the shelf doing its work for years together. There is no actual revenue return from the product as it can be considered as a tool that is more of part of our company's infrastructure.

NETGEAR Switches can be considered a big brand, so its pricing point is a bit higher than that of some of the other players in the market. In the market, there is some junk stuff available, especially the cheap ones out of China, that might get you into some kind of trouble, so my company does not buy such solutions. My company prefers to go for quality products like NETGEAR Switches.

No maintenance is required for the solution.

It is very easy to integrate the product with the other systems in our company's infrastructure since you only need to consider plugging a cable. My company does not integrate the product with any product specifically since we only consider integrations with the networks and infrastructures.

As the product needs to be plugged in and it starts working, I can say that it is a reliable solution that works. The tool also offers quality, especially if you consider how you would not know whether an unknown product that you choose would work for you or not.

I recommend the product to others.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

For the enterprise-level solution, it's for small to medium businesses. I'm quoting NETGEAR to pretty much everyone, instead of any other type of switch.

In terms of the NETGEAR models we use, it depends on the situation. We've used 4300s, 3300s, we've used a lot of Smart Stacks and Smart Switches and Plus Switches. We don't use really anything that can't be slightly managed, so it has to have at least a web interface.

We're an MSP. Let's say we do an entire network retrofit with a customer. We're talking about increasing bandwidth backbones ten to 20-fold, from one gigabit to 20 gigabits, utilizing the virtual stacking with the switches. It allows our workflow, managing their systems, to be quick and easy. We can do it remotely very well and we can do a lot of very granular programming changes without having to be onsite.

It's hard to give you metrics because what we do is rebuild entire networks, and most of them are old and dilapidated. They may have been okay in their day, but we're talking 10-year-old networks a lot of times. What we're doing is increasing their bandwidth, increasing security, and increasing the flow of traffic and data, depending on type, etc.

• Network monitoring 
• Ease of programming for VLANs, etc.

Also, I especially like NETGEAR because it's easy to teach system administrators how to use them, how to look at them, how to make changes to them without having the complexity of CLIs, but still having a CLI should we need it.

There's very little that I see as having large room for improvement, as far as the switches we're using go, for the most part. What I'd like to see is more compatibility with virtual stacking, so that 4300-series switches and 3300-series switches will actually stack together and that virtual switch stacks, themselves, are not limited to just six devices, so that they can create larger loops with more bandwidth and more redundancy.

I like the NETGEARs because they do everything exactly how I want them to, for the most part. There's not a lot that I would require for them to do better. It might be nice to see the little things like providing some switches with four SFP ports like they used to have, instead of just two, in those lines that we're looking at on the stackable side. Right now, it seems I have to have either eight SFP ports or two and there's no in-between, that's also stackable and managed, or at least stackable. The problem is that there's got to be enough of a need for them to actually create them. For me, those are little things that I would like to have, just to allow for a little more flexibility in what we're doing.

Regarding the switches, etc., the uptime is going to be comparable, the same as any other types of Ethernet switches that would be fulfilling the same roles. It may even be better in some cases because of the ability to have lifetime warranties and replacements.

I've currently maxed out the scalability of the switches, and this revolves around the virtual stacks. I would love to be able to add more switches into the virtual stacks. That's probably the only expandability I worry about right now. We've just implemented 10-gig to 20-gig connections, so we're pretty much at the top end of the spectrum.

The thing we would like to do at some point is to start looking at the 2.5-gig and 5-gig switches, possibly, for access points. But I think I might just go straight to 10-gig to be future-proof. They already have those switches in place. The industry itself is not going at that speed at the desktop level, so they're perfectly positioned. The scalability is such that it wouldn't have to be done for another four to five years and maybe not even then.

I have limited experience with their technical support because the switches are easy enough to understand so I haven't needed it much.

As far as the technical support we have gotten, it's more the automated technical support that I would like to see. I'd like to see a better Knowledge Base, better articles, things written by NETGEAR engineers to explain step-by-step how-tos, not just for me, but so that I can give them to my technicians and assistant administrators. It would be helpful if they could look at them on the screen and know how to do things, as opposed to having to call someone.

If we have to call someone, then it's already gone beyond the point of getting help. It means we probably need to replace the device.

Previous solutions were all over the place. I've always liked NETGEAR, I've always liked their price point. I've used them pretty much everywhere that I can, at least on the business level. I'm not really fond of the consumer grade, but I work in a business atmosphere so consumer grade shouldn't be there anyway. 

We've used the Ciscos, we've used Dell EMC, we've used HPE. They're all good, but NETGEAR has really cleaned up its act and made it look good and easy to use.

For the initial setup with the NETGEARs, there could be a little bit better help documentation for it. Small how-tos, and better explanations of what all the features are, because they do have a lot of features - which is wonderful. That involved a little bit of a ramp-up time, but it really wasn't a whole lot. 

The initial setup is really easy with them. It's easy to create a standard setup with them that can then be repeated across multiple customers, which then helps when technicians are maintaining them.

We do multiple deployments. One deployment, for a small business, could take a few days. Another deployment for a medium-sized business, depending on the number of locations, could take a few months. 

For instance, one of our customers has six locations across the United States, so we had to be able to get to those locations and then set up for, and be ready for, the entire installation and replacement of the old switches with the new. That implementation took time because it had to be planned. This particular customer is a 24/7 customer, they never go down. We were trying to maintain as close to a 99% uptime as possible, while still replacing their entire infrastructure.

The switches themselves have can be worked pretty flawlessly and quickly and enable us to make on-the-fly configuration changes onsite very quickly. One of the other reasons I like them is because it's just that easy to use them.

Our implementation strategy is typically trying to schedule some amount of downtime and then checking on the configs of the old switches, possibly pre-programming switches before they come into place, if I have that capability. We then bring those switches in onsite, bring the old switches offline, and put new NETGEARs in online. That is for existing customers. For new customers, we just program ahead of time and almost just drop them in and they're ready to go at that point.

As to whether you need to be an IT expert to deploy and support such a network, it depends on what you consider to be an IT expert. I think I'm an IT expert and I can do it. Someone at a much lower level than mine can also deploy and maintain these Ethernet switches. Are they IT experts? Well, it depends on what they know. 

The problem is that I'll see people who think they're IT experts but they know very little about actual IP and VLAN-ing and the like. They don't really know what Layer 2 or Layer 3 is or what the whole OSI structure is. It depends on what you call an expert: Is it someone who knows the whole structure or is it someone who knows the intricacies of routing BGP and OSPF and RIP? You don't need to be at the CCNP level. You don't even really need to be a CCNA-level, if we're talking about Cisco equivalency, because it's very easy to do but also very easy to teach.

We have not yet seen ROI. It's only been a couple of years since we first started. The return on investment is going to be hard to put a number on a because we sold these and they're working really well. If it continues the way it's going, then we're going to make a healthy profit, while still providing top-tier support for our customers with top-tier equipment.

It's a great price-to-performance solution. I think it's singularly the best price-per-performance we can find, if not just straight performance to begin with.

We like the idea that they're going with the Insight Pro licensing. We like that it's a per-device and it's handled by us, the MSP, versus being handled by them. For instance, with the Merakis, all the licensing is handled by Meraki, and Meraki will try to undersell you or sell you right out of your own client, when it comes to reopening subscriptions.

NETGEAR has taken a different approach and values its partners much better. That's something that's very important to me. There's not a lot of need for licensing other than that, because, while I can buy some types of subscription for some of these, for support and such, we don't really need them. They have a lifetime warranty and we have staff on hand to be able to handle most of the more complex issues that we would have, other than things that need hardware replacement.

The cost of hardware and additional services is lower, absolutely. I wouldn't say "low," but we found it to be lower than other options, and that helps us resell this back to customers who are looking at other things like a Cisco Meraki, where the money is very important. On the school level, municipalities have very limited funds and if they can get more bang for their buck and it really means that much more, then it's a lot easier to sell a NETGEAR than a Cisco Meraki, especially since the longevity is there and there's a better warranty on them.

We've looked at Cisco's Merakis vs NETGEAR and HPEs vs NETGEAR and done price comparisons versus manageability, but the NETGEARs, far and away, were better. Merakis are very good, but the price point is way too high, and the required subscriptions could leave some of our smaller customers without connections because they're forgetful or just don't know to do these things or don't want to pay for them, constantly, like that. I like the way that NETGEARs work. They go well with our business model.

We did not consider Ubiquiti. We need something more mainstream and we weren't willing to go with them. We don't think they've been in the game enough.

Strongly consider using NETGEAR in replacement of some of the other larger switch manufacturers. Recognize that the manageability is there at a lower level so you can employ less-highly-skilled people to maintain the devices. As far as small and medium businesses go, they need to be able to have that ability because they don't always have dedicated IT people. You're better off going with this type of implementation because the features are there, the ability to program is there, and the ability to understand them is far easier than it is for a lot of others, making the implementation a lot easier.

In terms of the AV over IP, we split everything up in the VLAN so we don't differentiate AV. We don't have a lot of AV traveling over the networks, just yet, other than the occasional IP camera. Most of them are still in their own switch network.

Deployment could take one or two people. A lot of times it would be myself as the network architect and then another system administrator to help move things, unplug things. It's more of a physical issue. The switches themselves are very quick and easy and barely even take any time out of my schedule. I don't really schedule for them because they can be done on the fly. It's more about the physical limitations that cause scheduling to go awry.

As for extent of usage, for us, any new or refurbished network is 100 percent NETGEAR as far as the backbone and switching go. We will continue to be using them. They're making good advancements in their product lines and they're well-positioned where they are now for how we need to use them. I'm very happy with them.

I would rate NETGEAR at about an eight out of ten, only because I always think everyone has room for improvement. As I said, they need a little bit better Knowledge Base, they need a little better help or support online, directly on the switches or from the switches. Documentation is key for me. And, as I said, I need more stacking when I do virtual stacks. I want to be able to do a lot larger virtual stacks.