For a long time, NETGEAR have been known for offering cost-effective hubs and switches for use with twisted-pair wired Ethernet segments in homes and small businesses. In the early days, this meant very small five-port unmanaged 10/100Mbps hubs and switches that didn’t cost much and could allow you to easily consider wiring for Ethernet.
To the same extent, they released a 56k dial-up modem router with an integrated four-port hub which was the first product of its kind to offer dial-up Internet across a network without the need for a computer to be running. But it was considered a product ahead of its time thanks to ADSL or cable broadband Internet not being available in many areas and not many home networks being set up for the Internet. But it led on to some of the most capable NETGEAR modem routers to surface like the DG834G which had won a significant amount of accolades in its day.
Subsequently they were one of the first companies to offer some affordable unmanaged Gigabit switches that can be a Power-Over-Ethernet power-source device. This was offered on half of the ports on these devices but they gradually offered some Web-managed models that had all of the ports covered.
Another approach was to offer Web-managed Ethernet switches that had a focus on ease-of-use. This was about a “big-business” feature where an Ethernet network can be managed to do things like manage quality-of-service or segment a LAN for further control. But NETGEAR’s approach not just provided the Web-based dashboard on each of these switches but provided an “automatic-transmission” approach to quality-of-service management in a manner to make this concept appeal to the small network. One of these switches that NETGEAR offered was even designed to be able to be powered using Power-Over-Ethernet, something that could appeal to “regional” switches or those devices serving a cluster of network equipment at a table or desk.
But NETGEAR took this concept further with a gaming-grade network switch that has the features of a business-grade network switch but is pitched towards gamers and multimedia enthusiasts. The Nighthawk S8000 Web-managed switch has the ability to be managed like the typical business-grade managed switch but invokes the “automatic transmission” approach like some other NETGEAR switches for QoS management. It is presented in a style that makes it attractive to use in the home entertainment centre where a 4K UHDTV, XBox One or PS4, and similar devices are installed and you want something better than Wi-Fi for online gaming or video streaming at Full HD or 4K UHD.
This unit even implements link aggregation / port-trunking for up to four Ethernet ports so that the Nighthawk S8000 switch can be purposed as an “off-ramp” for a high-speed link to a gaming rig, router or NAS with this kind of connectivity. In this case, the bandwidth offered by the aggregated ports is treated as one high-speed link. Let’s not forget that this unit can be integrated into a sophisticated VLAN-driven network and NETGEAR put a tentative price of US$99.99 for this unit intended to be released around March 2017.
The goal with all of these products is to offer something that could be considered only fit for big business but at a cost-effective price and with an approach that reduces operational complexity.