8-Port PoE Switch — PS082 and 1011GB

Where eight ports is the right answer

Eight ports suits a site with up to eight devices: a small office, a clinic floor, a shop with a back room, or an entrance group of gate, lobby and car park cameras. It is also the natural size for a satellite switch feeding a group of cameras on a distant part of a large site.

The mistake to avoid is buying eight ports for a site that will obviously grow to twelve. A second switch means a second uplink, a second power point and a second device to document. Buying the sixteen port model once is usually cheaper over three years than buying eight ports twice.

The 120 W budget in practice

A 120 W class budget comfortably powers eight fixed 5 MP cameras with headroom. It fills up faster if you add a PTZ dome, a heater or a wireless access point, because those devices draw considerably more than a fixed camera, especially at start-up.

Budget for the peak rather than the average. The moment that matters is cold start on a winter morning with every illuminator and every heater on at once — that is when a switch running close to its limit will drop a port.

Using the extend mode properly

Extend mode carries power and 10 Mbps data up to 250 m on the ports that have it enabled, and isolates those ports from each other. That last detail is useful: on a fence line where cameras are chained, an isolated port means one faulting camera cannot flood the others.

Reserve it for the positions that need it. If a camera is at 60 m, leave it on a normal port at full speed and save the extend port for the genuinely distant position. Extend mode is a solution for a specific geometry problem, not a general setting.

Also in this range: the 1011GB

Same eight PoE ports and the same 120 W class budget as the PS082, with an added fibre uplink for a camera group that sits a long way from the recorder.