PoE Injector vs. PoE switch

[magic]

Hi:

As some of you may have seen my other posts about access points, I need to get PoE to whatever AP I decide on. I currently have a non-PoE managed L2+ switch as my main switch centrally located in my house. I was looking at the various PoE injectors on amazon and started to look at those cheap unmanaged PoE switches, e.g., Yuanley, TP-Link, etc. Cost per port, you can pay less going the switch route. So some of the questions I have are, what's the pro's and con's between the 2? One big question is, what's the performance impact? Is it negligible? Being how cheap those switches are, I'm not seeing much benefit to go with the individual injectors.

Thanks.

Btw, this has been a great site.

 

[thiggins]

I'd go with the PoE switch. TP-Link makes a bunch of them that aren't that expensive.

You need to be careful with injectors. Some cheap ones assume two of the four twisted pair in a CAT5/6 cable are unused. That can fry your device, switch or both.

 

[John Davis]

I'd go with the PoE switch. TP-Link makes a bunch of them that aren't that expensive.

You need to be careful with injectors. Some cheap ones assume two of the four twisted pair in a CAT5/6 cable are unused. That can fry your device, switch or both.

as long as you make sure your injectors are af/at you’re safe - of course this also means the gear you’re powering needs to be af/at compliant as well

as for switch vs injector - the OP also needs to watch power budget, a lot of the small POE switches have very limited power supplies, and POE switches with big supplies are both dear and bulky.

 

[CaptainSTX]

Hi:

As some of you may have seen my other posts about access points, I need to get PoE to whatever AP I decide on. I currently have a non-PoE managed L2+ switch as my main switch centrally located in my house. I was looking at the various PoE injectors on amazon and started to look at those cheap unmanaged PoE switches, e.g., Yuanley, TP-Link, etc. Cost per port, you can pay less going the switch route. So some of the questions I have are, what's the pro's and con's between the 2? One big question is, what's the performance impact? Is it negligible? Being how cheap those switches are, I'm not seeing much benefit to go with the individual injectors.

Thanks.

Btw, this has been a great site.

If you decide to use a POE switch you need to be sure it supplies the correct voltage for the device it will be powering remotely.

You also need to take into account the distance from the POE switch to the remotely powered device. If the distance results in to great a voltage drop then you may need to consider using POE injector mid-span.

 

[ddaenen1]

The great advantage of a POE(+) switch is that you do not need a plug anywhere to power the AP's which provide extras flexibility in positioning them. Another thing, not so often thought of, is that if your switch is connected to a UPS, your AP's are also protected from a power surge, will not go down and do not have to reboot in case of an outage.

 

[Seventh Monkey]

The advantage of an injector is that if it fails you don't have to replace the entire switch to fix the issue. IMO the biggest disadvantage is the additional cabling and resultant mess o wires. Regardless of which route you go visit https://www.poetexas.com/ . Tons of useful information there and I use their PoE tester.

If I were to buy injectors I would likely use theirs, but as it turned out I went with a PoE switch. I went with a Ubiquiti ES 24/500W because it meets my needs and was able to fine one new in box uber cheap because a lot of people shifted from the Edge series to Unifi. I would look hard at used Netgear PoE as they are pretty robust and can be had inexpensively.

The nice thing about Ubiquiti and Netgear (and some others) is that you can get patches/firmware without a support contract and both have active forums to help with troubleshooting.

 

[coxhaus]

I think Cisco small business switches are good. You can buy them with POE and POE+ and I think POE++. The Cisco CBS350 switches are new and the Cisco SG350 and SG350X are older with some nice buys on eBay. The SG350x have 10gig up link ports. There are lots of models. The firmware for these switches is free for the life of the switch with Cisco fixing security issues that come up nowadays.

I think the layer 3 Cisco switches are better than the Netgear layer 3 switches. The Netgear layer 3 switches are old software with limits. I assume we are talking small business here.