FAQ’s

What’s the difference between a managed and an unmanaged Ethernet switch?
Managed switches give you more control over your LAN traffic and offer advanced features to control that traffic.
An unmanaged switch simply allows Ethernet devices to communicate with one another, such as a PC or network printer, and those are typically what we call “plug and play.” They are shipped with a fixed configuration and do not allow any changes to this configuration.

What’s the difference between a level 2 and level 3 managed switch?
A L2 switch does switching only. This means that it uses MAC addresses to switch the packets from a port to the destination port (and only the destination port). It therefore maintains a MAC address table so that it can remember which ports have which MAC address associated.
A L3 switch also does switching exactly like a L2 switch. The L3 means that it has an identity from the L3 layer. Practically this means that a L3 switch is capable of having IP addresses and doing routing. For intra-VLAN communication, it uses the MAC address table. For extra-VLAN communication, it uses the IP routing table.

What is a combo port on an Ethernet Switch?
A Gigabit Ethernet Combo port is an Ethernet port and a Mini-GBIC port (also called SFP´s – Small Form-factor pluggable ports) that share the same switch fabric and port number. A Combo port is a way to provide different types of connectivity without taking up unused switch fabric. These Combo ports can also be labelled as tied, meaning two different physical ports that can only be used one at a time. A Gigabit Ethernet Combo port consists of one 1000Base-T Gigabit over Copper port (provided), and one Mini-GBIC port (empty port that requires Mini-GBIC module).

What is meant by Max. No of Full Power ports?
Each Switch has a maximum rated power that it can provide, this is usually measured in Watts.
The combination of power taken from each POE (Power over Ethernet) port cannot exceed this maximum rating.

For example a switch may offer 8 POE ports, however if it’s maximum rating is 65 watts then only four of these ports can provide 15.4W each.

When selecting an Ethernet Switch to provide POE to Network devices a calculation must be made to ensure that the Maximum power rating of the switch will not be exceeded if all POE ports are populated.