Watch out, I'm not sure about the SG108 but the SG108E has a known defect where it incorrectly broadcasts non-VLAN traffic across all ports, regardless of configured VLAN settings. https://community.tp-link.com/en/business/forum/topic/89181

I have confirmed this with my own version 1 SG108E (which additionally can't actually be managed without an ancient version of java and iptables /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward forwarding tricks. https://shred.zone/en/dev/setting-up-tp-link-tl-sg108e-with-...)

I'd say stay far away from this hardware line unless you actually do just want a dumb switch. If you do buy make sure you know exactly what hardware revision you're getting. I've heard the version 5 fixes it.

> given the price point of these switches when buying new I would highly recommend that you instead look for a used managed Gigabit switch.

Power, power, power .... one of these older gigabit switches is going to use 10x power at idle, compared with one of the crappy and cheapest realtek-based "unmanaged" switches. Which is kinda important for something that is going to be 24h on. And of course since no one reviews these things, you'll only know once you have spend the money.

So if you really can get away with a crappy web interface onto the crappy low-power realtek chip, you may get the best of both worlds.

I'd call the web interface on low-end managed switches a liability [0]. It would be interesting to write one's own 8051 firmware from the ground up [1]. It shouldn't actually be terribly hard to have some basic thing that accepts a binary chip config image from the network, right? The existing 512KiB flash ought to be enough for that. And since Realtek switch chips seem to be so popular, it could even be made generic enough to work across models. Then a user would just need a flash programmer.

My core network is Mikrotik gear with 10Gb uplinks, but it would be nice to use my old unmanaged gbit switches (Netgear GS108 mainly) with vlans rather than going nuts with more Mikrotik or having lots of homeruns.

[0] high-end ones too, for that matter

[1] the alternative I thought of first was setting up an Arduino as an I2C slave. But then you'd also want to switch the switch's power supply, and need an ethernet port on the Arduino just to connect to the switch itself.

For slightly less dinky option rtl838x/rtl839x based switches are quite common and relatively cheap. What makes them special is that they are well supported by openwrt

https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/targets/realtek

In very cost sensitive applications where you want 'managed' and 'cheap' like security cameras for an ordinary house, the best non hack solution I've found is to have something like a basic managed non-PoE switch, and then hang a dumb switch downstream of it for the sole purpose of aggregating something like IP cameras.

For example some of the cheaper unmanaged 8-port 802.3af/at switches with enough power budget for 7 cameras. Average traffic from a single camera isn't a lot, easily fitting in a single 1000BaseT link to the managed switch. Put the whole dumb switch in the camera vlan.

Cool hack - I have the ‘smart’ managed version of that switch (although the PoE version of it I think), and it looks exactly the same to the unmanaged one - absolutely makes sense that it’s basically identical (just a BOM change for the different flash to fit the larger firmware).

Often it’s way cheaper to have one hardware version and control features in firmware, and that principle is even more true for silicon (same die but fuses that are blown to disable parts of it, or the chip clocked down because it might not perform properly at the speed of the more expensive SKU), so not surprising it’s this way!

> The TL-SG108 uses a 4Mbit (512KiB) SPI flash chip from Cfeon, which is too small to contain any assets for a web management interface

The https://github.com/logicog/RTLPlayground alternative firmware for RTL8372/RTL8373 based 2.5GBit Switches does fit into 512KiB, including web management interface.

Aliexpress managed sfp+ 10 gigs with 8 ports have also gotten remarkably affordable

If you’re willing to go the no name brand route

Archive.md link: https://archive.md/BXov8

In case you were also inexplicably blocked by Cloudflare.

8051! I love it. Its like running web stacks on these ESP8266's without the crypto acceleration.

But at the same time, we have to stop pretending that 1Gbit Ethernet isn't utterly obsolete in the same way that RS-232 is. Useful maybe for low power, longish reach, but its slower than a good number of internet connections now, and the wifi on the other end too.

Ex: My house, turns out the 1Gbit uplink from the ISP provided hardware to my firewall was causing me to lose 300MB because it was actually provisioned at 1.3Gbit, and when I switched it to 5Gbit, my Wifi got faster.. Ex, I can get in excess of 1Gbit in about 2/3rds of my house now to sites on the internet.

1GbaseT is 27 year old technology this year, 10GbaseT is 20 this year, and by any other computing metric should be obsolete too since there has been a 25GbaseT spec for 10 years that no one has bothered to manufacture. And here in 2026, double or more should be easy with modern phy technology, and with proper line quality could easily be all of dynamic power, dynamic length and dynamic speeds over a range of cable types and length, both running at lower power and higher performance.

Gigabit seems undersized for a home LAN these days. 2.5Gb equipment isn't significantly more expensive and any Cat6 should handle it. Fiber is cheap enough too if you want some 10Gb devices. Only expensive thing is SFP ethernet adapters but you can put an SFP NIC in your PC and bypass the problem.

I've been using this equipment in my home LAN for a mix of 10Gb fiber, 2.5Gb ethernet, and a small number of devices that came with 10Gb ethernet ports (Tyan motherboards) get SFP ethernet adapters.

Unmanaged 4x2.5Gb ethernet 2x10Gb fiber - https://a.co/d/08J99UjH - I daisy chain these with fiber connections to have a kind of 10Gb backbone that terminates at my main PC with the fiber NIC.

Managed 10x fiber - https://a.co/d/06927QeJ - This is the most economical 10Gb fiber switch I could find at the time and it's had no problems for the low price. Has a serial management interface in addition to web. Extensive management capabilities. I've used its link aggregation successfully.

Managed 4x2.5Gb ethernet 2x10Gb fiber - https://a.co/d/0fud7jzF - First hope off my modem before the fiber switch, good management capabilities.

It's kind of funny, my LAN is all random Amazon brands people would warm against relying on, but I picked out ones that have been solid and reliable for years of use. No need to break the bank if you find the right stuff.

zyxel gs1900 series - can be low power, or go up to 48 ports, and even with POE (of course more power because, POE)

runs openwrt

I believe this to be a utility issue. In the average home network, having greater than a gig networking provides little value for the center of the bell curve of users.

Maybe its different outside of America but most people in America have less than 1gbps internet connections, and have little need to transfer data in-house from one location to another that the time saved by having a 5, 10, or 25gbps connection would benefit them in any measurable way.

Even for those people who run NAS systems for extra storage will only saturate gigabit connections occasionally, and being able to save a few hours a year waiting for transfers to complete is likely not worth the initial setup effort and costs for them.

I'm a bit of a techie, and my house is wired for 10gbps internally, but no isp in my area offers more than 1gbps, and I live in a well-to-do and densely populated area near to many tech companies.

So, in short, 1gbps is not obsolete. It probably should be, but it still meets the needs of the great majority of people that use it.

I dunno, I'd like to see faster options taking off but last time I checked they were just starting to get cost-effective. I'm not paying a factor more for 10GbaseT when I don't actually need that kind of speed.

1 Gbps is perfectly adequate for things such as Apple TV's, smart home controllers/gateways (heck even 10 Mbps is fine for them), networked printers, UPSes (also would be fine with as low as 10 Mbps), KVMs, etc etc etc

> there has been a 25GbaseT spec for 10 years that no one has bothered to manufacture

because dealing with fiber is easier than cat8 copper. unless you want poe there is very little reason to use base-t.

I'm a bit irked that there aren't more, less expensive 10gb 10baseT ethernet switches available. I have one that I have as my main connection in the wiring closet (need to get my NAS back in there), and a few 2.5gb switches off of that (one in my office)... mostly because I just didn't want to shell out the dramatically more expensive option.

Faster is only needed when you need the speed. 2.5G and 10G NICs eat power - all the ones I seen have heatsinks.