Tenda TEG5328F — L3 Managed switches

Buying it, and when not to

The TEG5328F is an L3 managed switch with no PoE. Layer 3 means the switch routes: it moves traffic between VLANs and subnets itself rather than sending everything back to a router to be turned around.

This is a network core. On a campus, a hotel, a large estate or an ISP aggregation site, the traffic between internal subnets - staff to server, camera to recorder, floor to floor - is often far larger than the traffic going to the internet. Routing it in the switch at wire speed keeps it off the router's WAN-facing interface, which is both faster and more robust: the internet link going down no longer breaks internal services.

For a single-subnet building it is unnecessary complexity and an unmanaged TEG1016G or a cloud-managed TEG2226F will serve better because there is less to get wrong. It carries no PoE, so access points and cameras need powered switches beneath it. And if you want a core that also powers devices directly, the TEG5328P-24-410W is the L3 switch with PoE. Specify L3 when somebody has drawn a diagram with multiple subnets on it and can say which traffic crosses between them; if nobody can answer that question, L2 or cloud-managed is the honest recommendation.