NETGEAR 48-Port Gigabit Ethernet Smart Managed Pro Switch, 4 SFP GbE Fiber Ports, Poe/PoE+, 384w, ProSAFE Lifetime Protection (GS752TP)

Pros: Unknown

Cons: Unfortunately, these switches appear to have serious GUI problems. Among current versions of Chrome, Firefox, and IE, only IE11 in compatibility mode will allow you to log in. From there, you can *mostly* configure these switches. If you want to work with LAG Membership or the system monitoring, forget it. With Java installed and using Firefox 6 or 8 you can configure membership for 1 of 8 of the LAG groups. Netgear attempts to address this issue for other switches here: http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/23841 These browsers do not work for this switch. Similar issues are reported here: http://forum1.netgear.com/showthread.php?t=87318 http://forum1.netgear.com/showthread.php?t=89674

Overall Review: Netgear equipment is generally good for "bargain" equipment. To be fair, I only kept these switches for a day, but I went through over 20 different releases of web browsers without finding a clear winner. I did not fully give Netgear support the opportunity to work through these issues. I am however, running current firmware and they could not name a "known good" browser for these switches.

Pros: easy on budget; past experience has been mostly positive.

Cons: quirky web management interface that is incompatible with all modern browsers except IE with compatibility view

Overall Review: If you are using latest IE, chrome, firefox or safari like I do, you will not be able to fully configure this model. Why? Because its javascript code contains legacy functions that works only in older version of IE. If you call their tech support, you will be surprised that you are the only one who has this problem, at least that was the impression I had. And you will be told to install other browsers that you currently don't have. Save yourself some hair and frustration, use IE, but turn on compatibility view for its web interface. You will be all good. If you are a linux or mac user? don't buy netgear!

Pros: Price. This little guy has a bunch of features for its price compared to the competition. You can't find a 48-port PoE layer-3 switch for this value. It has enterprise networking features you need to manage traffic in a small-medium business environment. Flow control, QoS, VLANs, routing and ACLs -- everything you need to segment your network and stop chatty machines from bringing it to a crawl.

Cons: Here's the kicker: the UI is slow, buggy and NETGEAR doesn't care. It throws JS errors in every modern browser. Netgear recommends (get this...) that you use *IE8* in 2014; they say other browsers "are not supported." Many features are unusable unless you keep an old browser/VM around for the express purpose of managing your switch 0.o. That's inexcusable and tacky. For that matter, their support is terrible. They implement QoS in a weird way on this switch, so I called for help. I waited a month for them to reply to me with an inconclusive answer. When I figured out they didn't know how to use their own hardware, I finally just did trial and error until I verified the correct tagging of my traffic with a packet monitor. Problem solved in a day.

Overall Review: The switch is okay and all four are still working after a year running 24/7. I admit though, I would easily spend the extra money for better support, a richer feature set, and a stable UI if I had to do it over again.

Pros: Easy to set up (set a DHCP reservation on the network, and it instantly worked). We have 3 other Netgear switches, and, at this price point, you can't go wrong. No sense in spending 4X as much for the same technology.

Cons: Upon initial setup, all network ports worked, but POE was not working. I discovered via several internet searches that it needed a firmware update. Why was this device shipped with out-dated firmware? It was easy enough to update the firmware (did it remotely, without having to disconnect anything), but it was a frustrating few hours trying to figure it out. Also, there is a limit to the number of ports that can be mirrored for traffic monitoring. I'd like to be able to mirror ALL ports at once.

Overall Review: Just make sure to disable POE on any uplink ports on this and any other Netgear switch it is connected to, and be sure the firmware is updated to V6.0.1.18 if you plan to use POE.

Pros: 802.3at on the first 8 ports. Free next business replacement of dead switches - read on for why I know this.

Cons: The web console is slow and only works in some browsers, but knew that from the other reviews, and can deal with it. After about 1 month of use, the switch rebooted unexpectedly. Now none of the ports will provide power. They all report 'OtherFault'. Most of the ports still work as Ethernet ports, but some do not work at all. Here's the kicker: 4 devices that were connected to this switch now have damaged Ethernet ports and have to be replaced as well. It's the first time I've ever had a switch die and have it take out other devices with it!

Overall Review: This failure feels very much like a power surge, but the switch is connected to a APC Symetra 6KVA UPS, and so if there was a surge, I believe the Netgear switch to be the origin - faulty power supply or something. Perhaps the power circuitry used to provide PoE malfunctioned and zapped some ports. I don't know, and neither did Netgear support.

Pros: It didn't work. POE functionality was DOA. Kinda of annoying. Should have read more reviews prior to ordering. Will replace it with cisco.

Cons: POE doa. check the other reviews. Especially on other sites. many people having this problem. Now have to deal with return.

Pros: Good value and features for money (cable test, PoE, rich statistics, good protocol support) Factory defaults work very well. Good fallback while testing new network configurations.

Cons: GUI is incompatible with almost all browsers except Chrome. Needs some uncommon Adobe run time program to display screens. Cannot manage port attributes for speed (might be browser bugs) Noisy cheap fans that will probably fail in 3-4 years. LED display mode switch (POE or port speed) does not work.

Overall Review: Do some software support. Netgear forum has 5+ owners with browser errors. It is a pain to downgrade software to manage the switch. Test releases. Key work here is "smart" switch.

Pros: Cheaper than a Quality Cisco or HP switch, but not as full featured. I even had 2 little 5 port 1G switches at home because I liked them.

Cons: Had an issue with IP phones. As the devices were at a customer site and had been for a few months, NetGear wouldn't provide support without a fee although the equipment was still under warranty. So, how does one get a warranty repair. "Simple, just pay us $75 and we will help you get the patch you need to fix this" was the jist of the tech support call.

Overall Review: I'm a Network Engineer. Been that way since the 90's. Bad mistake trying to save some money. Those 3 switches were taken out and HP switches installed. VoIP problems went away with HP's default configuration. NetGear equipment ended up in the loaner pile, but not acceptable for production, simply because of the support policy. They have bad hardware but would not support it beyond 90 days without a fee. Sometimes problems take a long time to achieve resolution. We finally convinced an engineer from Allworx to come out and they found a massive dropped broadcast (UDP) packet issue causing intermittent de-register, ringing, or have one way audio. Gotta remember, VoIP phones need those broadcasts to function well. That was very last NetGear product I specified. I have a current budget in excess of $100K (last year was an EMC SAN and Cisco Call Manager so close to $400K). I now have a 3Com (HP Branded) 1G switch at home now. Got rid of NetGear there also simply because of their support policy.