Gigabit switching is cheap enough now that it is the sensible default for most ports. But "default" is not the same as "always", and on camera-heavy sites the money spent on gigabit to every edge device is money that would have done more good in the power budget.
Where gigabit genuinely changes something
- Desktops moving real files — design, video, CAD, or anyone working off a file server
- Backups — the difference between a backup finishing overnight and still running at 9am
- NVR playback — pulling several days of footage for review saturates a 100 Mbps link quickly
- Any uplink — the link between switches, or to the router, carries everyone's traffic at once
- Wi-Fi 6 access points — a modern AP can exceed 100 Mbps on its own
Where fast ethernet is still enough
A single 4MP camera stream runs at roughly 4 to 8 Mbps. Even at the top end, a 100 Mbps port is nowhere near saturated by one camera, and the switch is aggregating those streams towards the recorder rather than carrying them all on one edge port.
On a camera-only run, therefore, fast ethernet with a generous PoE budget is often the better buy than gigabit with a thin one. The cameras do not notice the link speed; they very much notice the switch shedding power at dusk.
The same holds for IP phones, access control readers and most building devices — none of them are bandwidth-limited at 100 Mbps.
The uplink is where it actually matters
This is the part most quotes get wrong in the opposite direction: gigabit access ports feeding a single gigabit uplink.
Twenty-four desks at gigabit share one gigabit link back to the server. In practice that is fine most of the time and terrible at 9am when everyone opens the same shared drive. Two fixes:
- Link aggregation — bond two uplink ports into one logical 2 Gbps link, available on managed and some easy smart models
- SFP uplinks — a higher-speed port, or fiber where the distance exceeds copper limits
Spending on the uplink almost always buys more real-world improvement than spending on the access ports.
Switching capacity, briefly
A switch's backplane should exceed ports × 2 Gbps — twice, because every port can send and receive at once. A 24-port gigabit switch wants around 48 Gbps of switching capacity. Below that the switch itself becomes the bottleneck, and no amount of link speed at the ports helps.
The figure is on the datasheet and rarely on the price list. It is worth asking for.
A practical split
On a mixed site we usually end up with:
- Gigabit easy smart managed for the desks, with cameras on their own VLAN
- Fast ethernet PoE, or gigabit PoE with a large budget, for the camera runs
- Aggregated or SFP uplinks between floors
- Fiber wherever a run exceeds 90 metres
Our range covers all of it — see the network switch page for port counts, PoE budgets and uplink types, or fiber and SFP products for the backbone.