Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsSolid Value-Option that did its job well, running 24/7 for almost 340 days
Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2019
TP-Link is a value option. They are not bad switches for the home user or even the small home office, this is no secret, so in that regard, to rate it so lowly is unfair, but I am intending this for someone who has NO I.T. experience, beyond buying a new computer, setting it up, and maybe installing Windows.
I bought my switch Oct. 21, 2018, and it would have made it to my home within three to four days max, meaning it would have went into service on the 24th or 25th. It ran basically without flaw, maybe with about 2 weeks collective downtime. It never serviced more than about four ethernet devices at once, and sat on top of one of the exhaust grills of my comptuer, which probably got well over 90°F at times. It fell a few times within its service, and in the last week of me deciding to write this, there was a lighting strike in the area, but our house was grounded well, so none of the devices were touched, thankfully, and any surging that might've happened, my Home Network is completely isolated with Surge Protectors--if we had expected lighting, at the time there was none, I would have unplugged all of the surge protectors and the cable wire from its surge protector.
Within a day or so after that lighting strike, by sheer happenstance, the switch starts getting slow sometimes, the LED's get confused, which indicates to me that the PCB manufacturing is not the best--it's been dropped and even over the exhaust of a hot computer, that's not the kind of environment for a switch.
If I recall, the switch came with a one year warranty, which I put off registering for a few weeks, before I finally forgot. If you know anything about warranty calculation, they test a hundred or so devices, and take the average lifespan and round up or down accordingly, so enough of the units failed within a year's time on the low-end. This machine almost made it to a full year.
It is still working for the most part, but every day or so, sometimes more, sometimes less, it needs to be unplugged for it to start switching traffic again, I estimate to get another month or more out of it, at which case, I will be replacing it with an old 15 Mb/s Netgear router I have, as I do not need Gb speed at the time, until I need it again, then I will be replacing it with a Netgear Gb model. I have nothing really against TP-Link, But why buy another model and have it expire in a year, when I could pay a little more for Netgear and have it last a bout 2 and a half to three years minimum. (Cisco is out of my pocket book, lol.)
It was a good switch for a beginner, or to have as backup. If you want tax write-offs, hey.
So, why the three stars instead of four? Because I think a year only is a bit ridiculous, but maybe I just mistreated, and I did, but tech can be roughed around a bit.
My recommendation: if it's just for your home network, don't be afraid to go for it. If you primarily use wi-fi devices, hey, keep it and your desktop devices UNPLUGGED, when not in use, to save on electricity and extend the switch's life.
If you intend on using it for a small office that will be using a few computers, I wouldn't go with it, because of reliability.
Hey, it saw about 338 days of continuous use before really encountering an error--that's not bad.
Thank you for your time, dear reader, and I hope I've helped.
EDIT: Oct. 26, 2019, basically a week after writing this, it literally stopped working. Interestingly, it smells like magic smoke (melting fiberglass and plastic,) which may expediate my theory of how the lights are lighting up wrong. So, if I had to guess, perhaps the layers of the PCB are rather thin, IDK.
