More Capabilities beyond Plug-and-play Connectivity 

Today's growing businesses demand and rely more on their network to carry out mission-critical business activities. Companies are putting more network traffic and applications on their Ethernet infrastructure. For example, the increasing deployments of VoIP phones and IP cameras require more than simple plug-and-play connectivity. It needs the network intelligence to separate the voice and video traffic from data, and prioritize them accordingly. Additionally, Internet-based applications such as Hotmail and Google Calendaring have made keeping the network up a business-critical need. However, companies do not necessarily have more money or advanced training to deal with complex managed switches. The NETGEAR ProSAFE Plus Switches meet this growing need by providing fundamental network features that will help optimize the performance of business networks. ProSAFE Plus Switches also offer traffic monitoring for users to observe traffic behavior. If there are connectivity issues, these switches can identify and even locate connection problems via cable diagnostic test. To optimize traffic through the switches, ProSAFE Plus Switches off er both port and tag-based prioritization to keep latency-sensitive traffic moving ahead of less critical packets. Also, ProSAFE Plus Switches offer port and 802.1Q-based VLAN as a means of improving security and network performance. ProSAFE Plus Switches are an upgrade from the plug-and-play Unmanaged Switch, delivering great value for empowering your network, delivering great value to the end user.

Prioritize Voice/Video

With the ability to set up and configure QoS, these Gigabit Plus Switches can detect different types of network traffic and assign the desired priority to latency-sensitive traffic, such as voice and video. This helps improve the delivery quality of related applications such as VoIP, multimedia broadcasting, and video conferencing.

Build Multiple Network Groups

These Gigabit Plus Switches can help divide big networks into smaller more manageable groups and have resources dedicated for one or several groups rather than making the same resources open to all. This feature improves overall network performance, adds security to network traffic, and makes more efficient use of network resources.

Troubleshoot Cable Problems

All Gigabit Plus Switches come with a cable diagnostic feature that enables users to easily find out the health status of their network cables. If there are any problems, this feature helps quickly locate the point where the cabling fails; allowing connectivity issues to be fixed much faster, potentially saving technicians hours of troubleshooting.

IGMP Snooping for Optimized Multimedia Traffic Delivery

By listening in on the IGMP conversation between hosts and routers, the Gigabit Plus switch can maintain a map as to which links need which IP multicast streams. The Gigabit Plus switch therefore will be able to forward multicast traffic only to the links that have asked for them and cut multicast traffic from links that do not contain a multicast listener. Essentially, IGMP snooping helps optimize multicast performance at Layer 2 and is especially useful for bandwidth-intensive IP multicast applications such as IPTV.