Tenda TEF1118P-16-150W — 16FE+2GE/1SFP Desktop Switch With 16-Port PoE

Buying it, and when not to

The TEF1118P-16-150W gives you 16 fast-Ethernet ports with PoE, plus 2 gigabit ports and an SFP slot, on a 150W power budget. The uplinks are the design feature: the access ports are 100Mbps but the traffic leaves on gigabit or fibre rather than through a congested 100Mbps link.

This is the switch for a real camera deployment - sixteen cameras round a compound, an estate perimeter, a market block, a school - where the SFP slot lets you take the uplink back to the recorder or the core over fibre instead of a long copper run. On sites spread across buildings, that single feature saves more trouble than anything else in the specification. A 150W budget across sixteen ports is realistic for typical fixed cameras.

If the drops are access points rather than cameras, buy gigabit: the TEG1120P-16-150W is the equivalent unit with gigabit access ports and will not throttle a busy access point. If your cameras are high-power - heaters, strong illuminators, motorised units - 150W over sixteen ports will not stretch, and the TEF1126P-24-250W gives you both more ports and more watts. For a handful of drops, the smaller TEF1105P or TEF1110P units are much cheaper. Always total the device wattage before ordering rather than counting ports.