With Wi-Fi 7 breaking through the borders of multi-gig connectivity and pressuring companies to embrace faster ports, we are seeing a long list of devices that support multi-gigabit Ethernet and SFP+. Including the new Netgear 8-Port 1G/10G Gigabit Ethernet Unmanaged Switch (GS108X).
This isn’t anything new since 10G products have been on the market for a while now. We ourselves make use of 10G SPF+ products all throughout the network at our offices. But this is the first mass push to support it in so many products, even those more financially available to consumers.
Netgear’s new switch features 8x 1Gbps Ethernet ports for all of your devices and a single 10Gbps SFP+ port for connecting it to the rest of your network (router, another switch, etc). You do have to provide your own SFP+ modules for connecting it to these other devices (which is normal), which can easily be found via retailers like Amazon (example).
With 10Gbps SFP+ connectivity to the rest of your networks (assuming the rest of your network fully supports multi-gig traffic) you don’t have to worry about a single device weighing down everything else on the switch. With 8x 1Gbps Ethernet ports, you have a potential of up to 8Gbps combined throughput.
It is designed around maximum energy efficiency, offers a plug-and-play experience since it is an unmanaged switch (no software or interfaces to adjust), and it falls within an affordable price point with an MSRP of $99.99.
It will be shipping in the middle of this month and can already be found on Amazon for pre-order. Not only that, but at the time of writing this, it seems to slightly be on sale for those looking to be an early adopter.
