WestPoint · Networks · D-Link
The box that is everywhere, and why that matters.
Switching with power over the cable and access equipment, from a very wide and very available catalogue. It does well what it does, and there are two things worth looking at before buying: whether it is managed and which exact revision it is.
What kind of house it is.
A long-standing house in access equipment, with an enormous catalogue and a distribution network that reaches everywhere.
It has been making switching, wireless equipment and network accessories for many years, and its range runs from the box that shares traffic out and tells you nothing to managed switches with power over the cable and per-port visibility. In video it turns up at that upper end, and also through one inelegant and very practical virtue: it is everywhere.
That availability is a real argument and it is rarely said out loud. When at six on a Friday evening the switch giving power to eight cameras in a shop dies, being able to have an equivalent box the next morning in almost any city is worth more than several lines of a datasheet. In small installations that decides projects.
And the other side has to be said: the catalogue is wide and uneven. The manufacturer's name on the box does not tell you whether what is inside is a managed switch you can diagnose a network with or a box that tells you nothing. That is looked at model by model, and the two warnings on this page come from there.
Managed or unmanaged, which is not a detail of the budget.
The first of the two things you have to look at, and the one that costs the most faults.
An unmanaged box shares traffic out and tells you nothing: it does not say which port is up, nor how much power it is giving, nor how much traffic is passing, and you cannot switch a port off remotely to restart a camera. The day something goes wrong there is nowhere to start looking: you have to go there, unplug things and reason by elimination.
And there is one case where that hurts: the power. An unmanaged box with power over the cable has its total like any other, exhausts it just the same and stops powering ports just the same, but it has no way of telling you. So the installation is left with two cameras that restart in the small hours in winter, spotless by morning, and not one place to look. It is the call we have had most often at small installations, and that is almost always the cause.
Our rule, and it is not about the brand: on the main video path, the switch is managed. The unmanaged stays for three cameras in a corner, or for a point where it is accepted in advance that if it fails the box gets swapped. It costs a little more and it pays for itself the first time something has to be diagnosed without going to the site.
The exact revision, and the spare that does not work.
The second thing you have to look at, and it gets discovered on the worst day.
In very wide and very long-lived catalogues it is normal for the same model name to be manufactured for years with different electronics revisions inside. They work the same from the user's side, but they do not carry the same internal program, and the configuration exported from one does not always load into another.
The consequence is concrete and awkward: the spare switch on the shelf, bought three years ago, may not swallow the configuration of the one that has just died. Whoever discovers this discovers it on a Saturday, with the installation waiting, and ends up configuring by hand from the documentation, which is exactly what the spare was there to avoid.
What we do: note the exact revision of every unit in the inventory, keep the configuration in a file and also in readable text — a sheet with the networks, the ports and the addresses, which can be followed by hand on any box — and buy the spare at the same time as the equipment and not three years later.
Power, traffic and cabinet.
The same as with any access range, told briefly because it is just as true.
The switch's total power is not what one port gives multiplied by the number of ports: it runs out sooner, and when it runs out it leaves ports unpowered in an order of priority nobody has configured. The sums are done with the cameras' winter consumption, with heater and with motor, and margin is left because in two years' time somebody is going to put two cameras on the free ports.
The port leaving the cabinet towards the recorder has to be faster than the camera ports. If it is the same speed it is the bottleneck of the whole cabinet, and no configuration fixes that: all the cameras send in the same direction, all day, and several people watching live add outbound traffic on top.
And the cabinet. This range is for quiet indoor spaces: rack or wall, human temperature, little dust. In an industrial unit's panel or a street cabinet it is not the place, and what happens there is not that it breaks: it is that it restarts in the small hours and is perfectly fine by morning.
Where it fits well.
In more places than it seems, with one piece of honesty: almost always it is not the protagonist.
In small indoor installations: a shop, an office, a residents' association, a workshop, a surgery. A managed switch with power over the cable, a few cameras and a network separated from the computers is a correct installation, and it costs what it can cost.
As an extension: the cabinet at the back of the warehouse where four cameras have appeared and power and an exit have to be provided without touching the core of the installation, which may be from another house. And as a reasonable spare in a small installation, because of the availability: the box you can have tomorrow is worth more than the perfect box that takes a week.
Where we would not put it.
Four cases: those of any access range, plus one of its own.
At the core of anything. The switch where the video from every cabinet concentrates, or the one powering the cameras that genuinely matter, is the point where one failure leaves the whole installation blind. There you look at power redundancy, internal capacity and support.
In a ring that has to rebuild itself before the recording notices the cut. The generic mechanism takes seconds, and seconds are gaps and fifty camera-lost alerts at once.
In an industrial unit's panel, a street cabinet, a place with dust or with vibration. It is not industrial equipment.
And the one of its own: we would not put it in by choosing blind within the catalogue. It is the brand where looking at the specific model matters most, because the spread runs from a box that tells you nothing to a managed switch with per-port visibility, and the brand name does not tell the two apart. Buying «a PoE switch from that brand» and nothing more is the way to end up with the first thinking you have the second.
Who administers it when we leave.
The client, almost always, on one condition: that what was fitted is managed.
If the switch is managed, the day to day is handled without trouble by whoever handles the house's computers: see the ports, see the power on each one, restart a camera by switching its port off, bring a camera online on the network it belongs to, export the configuration. The administrator account is handed over in their name, the configuration in a file and on paper, and the inventory with the model and the exact revision of every box.
If it is not managed, there is no day to day: there is nothing to administer and nothing to look at either the day something goes wrong. It is a legitimate decision in a very small installation, but it is a decision and it is taken knowingly, not through carelessness with the budget.
The boundary is where it always is — the separation of networks and the power sums when it is extended — and here there is one of its own: managing the spare. Buying the box, checking that the configuration loads into it and writing that down is an afternoon's work that has to be done once; if nobody does it, the shelf has an ornament.
And if there is already an IT team in your house with their own brand, it is installed with theirs without argument. In this range the brand is what decides least: what decides is that the switch is managed, that the outgoing port is faster than the camera ports and that the power sums have been done. We come with that done for whatever equipment they have, and when their equipment does not stretch, it is explained with the numbers and before signing.
Where to go next.
Managed or unmanaged is one of the network project's decisions, and the one most noticed on the day of a fault. That is what the area talks about.
Get started
Do you know whether your switch is managed?
Tell us which boxes there are, how many cameras hang off each one, whether any of them restarts on its own and whether there is a spare on some shelf. With that we will tell you what can be diagnosed with what you have, what has to be changed and what it is enough to leave documented.