Mini Industrial 4 Gigabit Ethernet Switch with 1SFP

I installed this into a distribution system for my house. It works great and gave me the ability to feed it directly from my 12 V UPS battery.

Okay, so maybe it's just not possible to know every brand or company that makes electronics these days. The days of only a handful of chip manufacturers and hardware tech are long gone. So you get things like Throncom, which . . . to my surprise . . . is a pretty decent product. Think about it, have you ever tried a restaurant with a new name and found that the food wasn't bad. I usually do this when I travel, because "what's in a name?" is sort of true, not for everything, but for mid-range electronics, the field is wide enough for a lot of players. I never set my expectations very high on electronics these days. It was the same with this. I can't resist tech gadgets and I'm slowly converting my entire home to fiber from ethernet (which was pre-installed by the builder and super not-good). So, I'll try to see what I can get and look for value wherever I can. This little no-name brand device isn't bad. To be honest, most of the electronics that are simple enough, like network switches, SFPs, Fiber cables, ethernet cables, etc. are not that bad because there's not a lot of intricate things to copy and translate. There's nothing complicated about seeing a place that looks like where an SFP would fit and you'd be right pretty much 100% of the time. Same with Ethernet. You only need to know what an RJ45 jack looks like and you're up and running. No need for any complicated "managed" switches. This just works. I had some spare 850nm SFPs lying around from scavenged old Cisco switches that I thought would work, just to try it out and they fit. Of course they're only rated for 1.25Gb, and not 10Gb, but at the moment I don't have fiber internet, so 1.25 is plenty for testing. I can always find some 10Gb SFPs down the road. So, just an FYI, you'll need a power supply, but if you have any rack units, they'll work from 12-48V, but it doesn't come with a power supply in case you were wondering why the price might be lower . . . that's pretty much why. Even with the old (truly old by optical standards) APac Opto SFPs it is faster than my 1Gb Ethernet switches (both managed and not). Upload and download maxed out my fastest computers. I don't know if I have anything on hand that could even check the 10Gb speeds other than running a bunch in parallel and seeing what works, but for now, that's all I need. I think I prefer the SFP slot to ones with built-in optics because I can actually get some extra life out of these old SFPs and when I'm ready to upgrade, it's a simple swap. Or if the laser happens to die (not likely), I don't have to replace an entire switch. But, that being said, this isn't a turnkey solution unless you know what you're doing or have worked in networking, or are willing to spend time to learn. But you really don't need to know a ton, not like even having a new CCNA cert., just a little bit of electronics and electrical experience. If you're on this page, then you probably know what you're looking for already. This isn't a bad price for what you get. And it works well without even feeling warm to the touch. I'll probably get a few more of these to complete my fiber conversion. Overall, a decent price for a product that works without having to learn another language or spend time on bizarre websites trying to figure things out. Five stars.