> 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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
I think the larger point is that dumping baseband and going with OFDM/etc over wider spectrum allows those cat5e runs that are rolling off at 600Mhz (or whatever) and the super clean cat8/whatever to coexist with bad cables, bad termination, etc. The spec could easily be built for say 50Gbit, and fall back to 2.5Gbit/etc on 200M chicken wire runs.
Then the argument about "but we have to pull more cable to guarantee those speeds" or "It consumes to much power" all go away, and instead the analog side gets a bit more complex, but given the $100+ phy's in 10GbaseT the argument that it drives cost is bogus when triband Wifi7 USB nic's are $30.
POE and existing wiring, and terminating copper on the lower end is dead simple for the kinds of people who wire houses, being able to run on cat3 phone cable would be even more of a bonus. There is a market for attaching APs, security cameras, and a load of other stuff on copper.
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.
As an American who recently moved and can now get 1/2/5Gbit XGS-PON, in a location which is borderline rural/suburban and was originally platted out 50 years ago, at the same price I was paying for shitty 400/20... I don't think our failures to invest a single cent in infrastructure or regulation over the past few decades should define the Ethernet working group's priorities.
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.
I had the 24 port version of these. They're fine for 'cooperative vlans' where you trust everything (enough), but want a little separation. But they're not sufficient if you don't trust the devices. You can't restrict management to specific vlans and iirc, there was a least one auth bypass.
At least for the version I had. I replaced it with some used smb stuff with a few 10g ports, cause unnecessary 10g is more fun.
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.
> 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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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 think the larger point is that dumping baseband and going with OFDM/etc over wider spectrum allows those cat5e runs that are rolling off at 600Mhz (or whatever) and the super clean cat8/whatever to coexist with bad cables, bad termination, etc. The spec could easily be built for say 50Gbit, and fall back to 2.5Gbit/etc on 200M chicken wire runs.
Then the argument about "but we have to pull more cable to guarantee those speeds" or "It consumes to much power" all go away, and instead the analog side gets a bit more complex, but given the $100+ phy's in 10GbaseT the argument that it drives cost is bogus when triband Wifi7 USB nic's are $30.
but why bother? basic fiber is dirt-cheap and optics are not that expensive either.
POE and existing wiring, and terminating copper on the lower end is dead simple for the kinds of people who wire houses, being able to run on cat3 phone cable would be even more of a bonus. There is a market for attaching APs, security cameras, and a load of other stuff on copper.
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.
As an American who recently moved and can now get 1/2/5Gbit XGS-PON, in a location which is borderline rural/suburban and was originally platted out 50 years ago, at the same price I was paying for shitty 400/20... I don't think our failures to invest a single cent in infrastructure or regulation over the past few decades should define the Ethernet working group's priorities.
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.
I had the 24 port version of these. They're fine for 'cooperative vlans' where you trust everything (enough), but want a little separation. But they're not sufficient if you don't trust the devices. You can't restrict management to specific vlans and iirc, there was a least one auth bypass.
At least for the version I had. I replaced it with some used smb stuff with a few 10g ports, cause unnecessary 10g is more fun.
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.