[asterisk-users] Any quiet 24 port POE switches out there?

[Anselm Martin Hoffmeister]

Am Mittwoch, den 03.01.2007, 16:51 -0600 schrieb John French:
> I have an upcoming install which places the switch close to some
> employees in a quiet work environment.  Can anyone recommend a quiet
> 24 port POE switch?  The Linksys SRW224P behind me right now would be
> objectionable, I'm sure.

I had to browse through the list of switches on the market recently for
different features.

Most switches do not feature an "acoustic" entry in their description.
Even those described as desktop devices... and just with it being named
a desktop device does not necessarily give you a silent device, au
contraire.

All I found was the Nortel BAS220 48T (with 24 out of 48 ports PoE
compliant), nominal 43.8 dB on the datasheet. I do not know that device,
but noise information on PoE switches seems not to be a thing that
manufacturers are proud of.

I guess building a 1u-switch with an included 300W++ power adaptor
requires active cooling, and the smaller the fans, the noisier the
whirl.

Maybe using several, smaller switches could do the trick for you. Brian
Roy mentioned the Netgear FS108p (with external power adaptor,
noiseless) as 8-port device. There is also a "larger brother" of it, the
FS116P, which also comes with an external power supply, does PoE on
eight of its 16 ports. I have no idea of your overall bandwidth
requirements, but if it is only about phones, 100 MBit should be by far
sufficient for those 20 devices, so you could cascade switches (like
plugging two FS108p into non-PoE ports on a single FS116P, for
instance). This is of course the cheapo way of doing it. Getting a
proper multi-port switch, perhaps even a "real brand" one would be (ask
the drooling sales droids out there) would be the real deal.

<rant>
Talking about NetGear switches, I once bought a 24port Gigabit Netgear
switch, noiseless, external PSU. It was meant to be screwed to a table
from below (in a classroom environment) with four metal brackets. The
switch kept crashing (not letting any data through) in that environment,
situation only changed when mounting that switch to a wall (with the
CAT6 cables hanging straight down from the plugs) - temperature problem
(which was "not bad enough" to go into warranty exchange. "Just do not
use the switch in a hot environment". 20°C in a boring computer lab) On
a non-PoE device, with far less than 300W power to go through.
</rant>

I personally do not trust wall-wart (a.k.a. external power supply)
switches too much. I do not think it is a problem in principle, but
those devices with internal power supply just tend to be better for me.
YMMV. 

If you find something worthy, with a decent sound, please report back to
the list so others can share a good experience.

BR
Anselm