The Switch Testing Experience: A Hands-On Review

I decided to try out this new switch on my phone's screen, and I was surprised by how quickly it rendered. The 450x360 resolution may not be the highest, but it looked decent enough for a phone screen. However, I did notice that the screen wasn't the most ideal aspect of the device. The front of the switches is missing a reset button, which was a concern for me. The reset button on the access point was recessed, making it harder to accidentally press it. But since the switch doesn't have a reset button on its back, I couldn't see how that could be avoided.

When I attempted to set up the device, I realized that it had been assigned to another user's account. This can happen if the previous owner of the device hasn't deleted it from their account. The setup process was straightforward, but I did feel uneasy about being connected to someone else's Cloud hosting account. It's not ideal for users who plan to sell or give away their devices.

Fortunately, the switch does offer a software update feature. When I clicked "Update," I was surprised by how quickly it finished. However, when I refreshed the page, the status still showed 100% complete. Apparently, the update process is faster than that! The device did reboot quickly after the update, which was impressive.

Upon opening up the switch's features, I was impressed by its comprehensive list of options. The power cycle and PoE features were particularly welcome additions. I could also set individual ports to specific VLANs or configure the native VLAN and tagged allowed vlans. The 802.1x feature for network access control is a nice touch, and I can mirror ports or combine them as needed.

One aspect that did surprise me was the color scheme used in the device's settings. It appears that colors are used to group specific APs together, which seems like an unnecessary feature. The term "colors" could be more clearly defined, but it's possible that this is just a branding decision rather than a fundamental design choice.

The link lights on the switch can be turned off, and I found this feature to be useful. However, what was even cooler was the ability to change the color of the LED lights. I opted for green, which looked nice. The lack of a screen, however, is a drawback – I would have liked to see a more comprehensive interface.

Overall, I'm pleased with the switch's performance and feature set. It seems like it's well-suited for small businesses or enthusiasts who want more control over their networking setup. While there are some minor drawbacks, such as the lack of a reset button and cloud-based account issues, these can be mitigated with proper management.

I did take note that this switch has been tested in the lab and has been adopted by someone's account. This process resulted in it being temporarily assigned to another user's account. Thankfully, I was able to request permission to use it again, and the software update feature works well.

In conclusion, my hands-on experience with this switch was largely positive. It's a robust device that offers many features for networking enthusiasts and small businesses. While there are some minor quirks, these can be worked around with proper management and configuration. I look forward to seeing how the local self-hostable controller will address these issues in the future.

One final note – my colleague joked about April Fools' Day, but we're not actually experiencing any issues with the switch or its integration into our network. It's just a normal day at the office, and this device is performing well as expected.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi welcome to Short Circuit I'm really excited for today because we're solving a problem that we've had for about 1 day we don't have Internet in our lovely office that is definitely not the old Langley house but ala Labs is hopefully here to save the day this is a switch and AP and networking ecosystem that I have not had the pleasure of experiencing yet and I'm really stoked to be doing it in this exact environment Belle's here with me to fact check we're staying 5p to fart don't worry we're going to start with the switch the S2 for Poe we've got the accessory pack here what do we got in here propaganda Community Forum technical support oops sorry there's stuff in there the elater did you pee is that why it's warmer uh don't don't think about it okay oh they come with rack studs that's so cool power cable only one which makes me think that this is not going to have redundant power supplies not my preferred but here we are and then we've got the little rack here that we're going to have to put on the switch in a minute oh we've got some free floaties wonderful oh nice nice foam oh that went right on my laptop okay this is the s24 poe it's a 24 plus two Port switch here 16 of them you can see in the Box here can do Poe plus power and the other eight are just normal gigabit and then on this side we have two SFP plus ports so those in theory based on it being sfb plus should do 10 gig although it doesn't say I'm just hoping that is the case around back we have two fans and a single power supply I would have really liked to see two power supplies here if I'm being honest I don't know what the price point is but I imagine it's reasonable and that's probably why I do like they have discreete uh LEDs for the poe power which is nice and I think that's pretty much it for here you can screw on the rack ears on the side but let's look at the Wi-Fi that's what people want hey look at that ap6 professional it's a 4x4 dualband Enterprise wireless access point so it's not going to be doing Wi-Fi 6E with 6 gz but it will do 2.4 and 5G on 4x4 which is nice wow it's a cool it's a nice form factor I will say I imagine this is an LED here we got a little that must be their logo yeah it's their logo on the back heat sinking a oh this reset button good job ala Labs it's on the back of an access point nobody's going to accidentally like push it we've got the poe plus input which is a 1 gig R j45 what else is in here propaganda uh plastic mounting bracket screws oh and little Feats if you want to put it on your desk that's a good good inclusion oh nice a bracket for installing on drop ceiling t- bars it's got the little ears so you would click it on and then screw in the presumably the blast the plastic bracket so it's ip54 which means I should be able to do this no we've got two I wouldn't go all the way way I think the 54 what does 54 mean you remember what ip54 is like splashes indirectly ip54 is pretty good I just dipped the tip that should be fine right yeah yeah tip dip tip dip here I could try this tip too or I'll tip dip this tip too what are you trying to do is this like a ubiquity competitor or something yeah but we need internet at the house right so that light you're welcome yeah brilliant how does this work ah wait what the hell how does this go oh oh uh so it just clicks in I this would be a lot easier to do if it was on a wall cuz you would just like tilt the end in and then slide it I imagine there's two little like spring-loaded tabs on the side well that screw's gone forever it's really really springy sprongs oh there we go and then you said wiggle it back and forth oh yeah that come came out pretty easily you'd imagine it would be on a ceiling and you would just stick the screwdriver in there that would pop that side out and then you just do it a wiggle yeah that's that's pretty easy I like that you don't need a special tool and uh this is just another one of those I guess that means we can deploy some Wi-Fi but not before I tell you about our sponsor Trend Micro it's been over a year since we were reminded how important it is to protect yourself from hackers malware and viruses online trend's micro premium Security Suite has several important tools to keep you safe things like a secure password manager and Wi-Fi protection you're even protected against identity theft with their dark web monitoring tool it works on Mac PC Android and iOS so save yourself some money while also saving your personal info so use the code short circuit 10 at the link down below to get 10% off trend micro premium Security Suite today all right we've moved inside I've been allowed to use a little bit of power so we can try this out and uh we got the aps here it linked up to the neighbors's Internet which is great I mean uh our internet great let's see if the Wi-Fi works got these great ubiquity ether that cables there's one see do we get any lights hey blue I downloaded their app and got signed in oh yeah look at that right there so yeah I see them on my phone already which is cool wait oh they even show on my laptop sick I just am on the Ala Labs website connected to the neighbor's Wi-Fi and it's working just fine so here let me go set up looks like they both have for more updates unfortunately damn that was uh that was fast connect it I want the most Wi-Fi five we'll do 160 wide why not it's not letting me pick DFS channels which is a little strange look at that oh that's cute it's even got like a traffic graph let me add a Wi-Fi network that we can connect to here neighbors Wi-Fi that seems appropriate add password oh oh yeah I forgot you can do that uh it was one of the big features that they announced when Alta laps kind of came to Market with these new APS uh you can have multiple passwords and Define different settings based on that password you can do this on ubiquity access points now too but you could have like one Wi-Fi network and you have a password for you and your partner and then you have a password for your kids and you want to have no download cap where you set them a cap where you can set a schedule so they only get Wi-Fi at certain times or uh you can make it so you bypass the like adult filtering and they don't blocked applications what can I add ooh look at all these applications oh there's no search here that's a little lame let's try that Tik Tok yeah no Tik Tok in this house I'm going to update these and then let's try them out you know curiously actually I don't see the switch it's not detecting the switch I don't know if the switches work on their dashboard maybe it's just a dumb switch wow they actually updated feels like in seconds I mean we cut the camera for a few minutes there but I wasn't really paying attention and they're already done oh yeah look at that wow the traffic it's already there it's very responsive I like that and it's cool because this isn't like a cloud key with ubiquity or like a paid online service this is just what you get by default you can have full management of your devices on their Cloud uh without having to pay for anything or pay for a subscription which is pretty cool for like normies um it would be nice to have the option to self-host the controller and I imagine they're probably working on that I can see my device here look I got an IP address we can see our negotiated rates are around 1,300 Meg let's run a speed test I think the neighbors only have one gig up and down so that's the best we're going to get here probably should uh here let me let me let me optimize this a little more here look at how optimized my Wi-Fi I don't know if these channels are already in use though so let me check that really quick let's try the scan feature and it will tell us scan quick scan shouldn't interrupt your Wi-Fi network that's cool oh wow that was look how fast that was it's already done it looks like I should use I need 160 wides so I need quite a few are the only 160 wides we got okay so I could do like 112 let's try that WiFi channel there we go yeah the DFS Channel channels are working now too so maybe that's just an app thing or because they were out of date I'm not sure and then for AP1 let me just disable AP1 oh look at that you pick the channel and you just hit disable so easy I love you ubiquity but the amount of times I've asked for just let me turn off the goddamn radio on an AP without having to screw around with like AP groups that was so easy and that's how easy it should be we do have it up on the 160 wide now let me connect and then we'll do a proper speed test and see how fast she goes it's not Wi-Fi 6C so we're probably not going to see beyond gigabit speeds and we only have a 1 gig uh neighbor connection here but it should still be pretty quick looks like about 560 down getting pretty close to 700 up if you had faster internet and um maybe not other people using it sorry neighbors it'd probably be faster but that's pretty good try it on my phone I guess it looks pretty similar 450 down 360 up not not the best ever but also not ideal circumstances whatsoever something I realized I missed earlier on the front of these switches is the reset button but it's not recessed now I liked it on the access point right there because it would be hard to accidentally press this it's on the back you can't even get to it if you wanted to here when you're fumbling around in the rack trying to plug in a cable I could see you accidentally pressing this that being said you probably have to hold it for some amount of time uh so it's probably a nonissue but seems a little bit sketch hey look at that actually the switch is picking up now here let's click set up appears to have been factory reset do you want to set up this device again yes is currently assigned to another user's account this can happen if the previous owner of this device has not deleted this device from their account do you want to request permission to use this device oh okay yeah I guess it's software drmed with their Cloud hosting even though I reset it I don't know how I feel about that I mean it's good from the perspective of it getting stolen and not being able to reuse but also if you were to sell one of these and not reset it from your account that would be not great they tested it in the lab and that's why it was adopted to somebody's account they reset it and now we are in it also has a software update but this time I'm going to roll because I want to know how fast it updates so there we go update click let's see oh there's a little no way there's no way it was that fast update 100% complete it says bullsh I'll refresh let's see no it still says 100% complete I don't know about this Chief the update status went away oh I think it's rebooting now that's pretty fast let's see how fast it reboots though yeah I don't have internet anymore that makes sense internet gone no I have to connect to the neighbor's Wi-Fi now the signal sucks okay I'm doing stuff now Blinky blink hey there we go okay a couple minutes pretty pretty fast pretty respectable let's take a look at what the switch features are really quick okay open it up there I see the ports in a very condensed manner power cycle the poe that's good I can click on individual ports I can set the native VLAN the tagged allowed vlans Poe speed isolation a download upload limit a voice VLAN Loop detection storm control Mac control seems like most of the things here oh it even has 802.1x uh so you can do network access control that's pretty cool I can mirror ports combine them I don't know what this color stuff is what does this even mean colors are a way to group specific APS together APS will only broadcast these Wi-Fi networks that match their configured colors both APS and Wi-Fi networks can be part of multiple colors and groups okay so that's basically AP groups that's what the colors mean they probably should have just called it groups and given the groups colors rather than calling them colors but here we are I can set vlans I can select all it's it's pretty much what you would expect it feels very new like this is software has existed for I don't know you know a year and they've got all the features in there but maybe the layout and whatever isn't the most optimal yet but it seemingly Works link lights hey you can turn them off let's try it hey look at that the link lights are off that's a good feature LED white red oo I can change the color let's go green eh ah green I wish it had a screen but the green is cool too so overall I mean I'm pretty stoked that there's another competitor in this kind of price point and space for small businesses and kind of like Enthusiast at home where you want more control over your stuff I look forward to when there's a local self- hostable controller I know that that's in beta right now but we'll have to see how that goes don't really like that it was DRM to another account as physical Hardware really wish that wasn't a thing maybe the local controller will make that not a problem but overall it cool it's a very responsive dashboard that much I like like look at this this is like a live feed of what's going on like the ibiquity one is pretty responsive but this is this might be another League especially considering it's currently cloud-based it's pretty impressive if you like this video like it get subscribed um April fools by the way we're not actually moving into the house we're not actually doing short circuit from a cold cold tub thank goshhi welcome to Short Circuit I'm really excited for today because we're solving a problem that we've had for about 1 day we don't have Internet in our lovely office that is definitely not the old Langley house but ala Labs is hopefully here to save the day this is a switch and AP and networking ecosystem that I have not had the pleasure of experiencing yet and I'm really stoked to be doing it in this exact environment Belle's here with me to fact check we're staying 5p to fart don't worry we're going to start with the switch the S2 for Poe we've got the accessory pack here what do we got in here propaganda Community Forum technical support oops sorry there's stuff in there the elater did you pee is that why it's warmer uh don't don't think about it okay oh they come with rack studs that's so cool power cable only one which makes me think that this is not going to have redundant power supplies not my preferred but here we are and then we've got the little rack here that we're going to have to put on the switch in a minute oh we've got some free floaties wonderful oh nice nice foam oh that went right on my laptop okay this is the s24 poe it's a 24 plus two Port switch here 16 of them you can see in the Box here can do Poe plus power and the other eight are just normal gigabit and then on this side we have two SFP plus ports so those in theory based on it being sfb plus should do 10 gig although it doesn't say I'm just hoping that is the case around back we have two fans and a single power supply I would have really liked to see two power supplies here if I'm being honest I don't know what the price point is but I imagine it's reasonable and that's probably why I do like they have discreete uh LEDs for the poe power which is nice and I think that's pretty much it for here you can screw on the rack ears on the side but let's look at the Wi-Fi that's what people want hey look at that ap6 professional it's a 4x4 dualband Enterprise wireless access point so it's not going to be doing Wi-Fi 6E with 6 gz but it will do 2.4 and 5G on 4x4 which is nice wow it's a cool it's a nice form factor I will say I imagine this is an LED here we got a little that must be their logo yeah it's their logo on the back heat sinking a oh this reset button good job ala Labs it's on the back of an access point nobody's going to accidentally like push it we've got the poe plus input which is a 1 gig R j45 what else is in here propaganda uh plastic mounting bracket screws oh and little Feats if you want to put it on your desk that's a good good inclusion oh nice a bracket for installing on drop ceiling t- bars it's got the little ears so you would click it on and then screw in the presumably the blast the plastic bracket so it's ip54 which means I should be able to do this no we've got two I wouldn't go all the way way I think the 54 what does 54 mean you remember what ip54 is like splashes indirectly ip54 is pretty good I just dipped the tip that should be fine right yeah yeah tip dip tip dip here I could try this tip too or I'll tip dip this tip too what are you trying to do is this like a ubiquity competitor or something yeah but we need internet at the house right so that light you're welcome yeah brilliant how does this work ah wait what the hell how does this go oh oh uh so it just clicks in I this would be a lot easier to do if it was on a wall cuz you would just like tilt the end in and then slide it I imagine there's two little like spring-loaded tabs on the side well that screw's gone forever it's really really springy sprongs oh there we go and then you said wiggle it back and forth oh yeah that come came out pretty easily you'd imagine it would be on a ceiling and you would just stick the screwdriver in there that would pop that side out and then you just do it a wiggle yeah that's that's pretty easy I like that you don't need a special tool and uh this is just another one of those I guess that means we can deploy some Wi-Fi but not before I tell you about our sponsor Trend Micro it's been over a year since we were reminded how important it is to protect yourself from hackers malware and viruses online trend's micro premium Security Suite has several important tools to keep you safe things like a secure password manager and Wi-Fi protection you're even protected against identity theft with their dark web monitoring tool it works on Mac PC Android and iOS so save yourself some money while also saving your personal info so use the code short circuit 10 at the link down below to get 10% off trend micro premium Security Suite today all right we've moved inside I've been allowed to use a little bit of power so we can try this out and uh we got the aps here it linked up to the neighbors's Internet which is great I mean uh our internet great let's see if the Wi-Fi works got these great ubiquity ether that cables there's one see do we get any lights hey blue I downloaded their app and got signed in oh yeah look at that right there so yeah I see them on my phone already which is cool wait oh they even show on my laptop sick I just am on the Ala Labs website connected to the neighbor's Wi-Fi and it's working just fine so here let me go set up looks like they both have for more updates unfortunately damn that was uh that was fast connect it I want the most Wi-Fi five we'll do 160 wide why not it's not letting me pick DFS channels which is a little strange look at that oh that's cute it's even got like a traffic graph let me add a Wi-Fi network that we can connect to here neighbors Wi-Fi that seems appropriate add password oh oh yeah I forgot you can do that uh it was one of the big features that they announced when Alta laps kind of came to Market with these new APS uh you can have multiple passwords and Define different settings based on that password you can do this on ubiquity access points now too but you could have like one Wi-Fi network and you have a password for you and your partner and then you have a password for your kids and you want to have no download cap where you set them a cap where you can set a schedule so they only get Wi-Fi at certain times or uh you can make it so you bypass the like adult filtering and they don't blocked applications what can I add ooh look at all these applications oh there's no search here that's a little lame let's try that Tik Tok yeah no Tik Tok in this house I'm going to update these and then let's try them out you know curiously actually I don't see the switch it's not detecting the switch I don't know if the switches work on their dashboard maybe it's just a dumb switch wow they actually updated feels like in seconds I mean we cut the camera for a few minutes there but I wasn't really paying attention and they're already done oh yeah look at that wow the traffic it's already there it's very responsive I like that and it's cool because this isn't like a cloud key with ubiquity or like a paid online service this is just what you get by default you can have full management of your devices on their Cloud uh without having to pay for anything or pay for a subscription which is pretty cool for like normies um it would be nice to have the option to self-host the controller and I imagine they're probably working on that I can see my device here look I got an IP address we can see our negotiated rates are around 1,300 Meg let's run a speed test I think the neighbors only have one gig up and down so that's the best we're going to get here probably should uh here let me let me let me optimize this a little more here look at how optimized my Wi-Fi I don't know if these channels are already in use though so let me check that really quick let's try the scan feature and it will tell us scan quick scan shouldn't interrupt your Wi-Fi network that's cool oh wow that was look how fast that was it's already done it looks like I should use I need 160 wides so I need quite a few are the only 160 wides we got okay so I could do like 112 let's try that WiFi channel there we go yeah the DFS Channel channels are working now too so maybe that's just an app thing or because they were out of date I'm not sure and then for AP1 let me just disable AP1 oh look at that you pick the channel and you just hit disable so easy I love you ubiquity but the amount of times I've asked for just let me turn off the goddamn radio on an AP without having to screw around with like AP groups that was so easy and that's how easy it should be we do have it up on the 160 wide now let me connect and then we'll do a proper speed test and see how fast she goes it's not Wi-Fi 6C so we're probably not going to see beyond gigabit speeds and we only have a 1 gig uh neighbor connection here but it should still be pretty quick looks like about 560 down getting pretty close to 700 up if you had faster internet and um maybe not other people using it sorry neighbors it'd probably be faster but that's pretty good try it on my phone I guess it looks pretty similar 450 down 360 up not not the best ever but also not ideal circumstances whatsoever something I realized I missed earlier on the front of these switches is the reset button but it's not recessed now I liked it on the access point right there because it would be hard to accidentally press this it's on the back you can't even get to it if you wanted to here when you're fumbling around in the rack trying to plug in a cable I could see you accidentally pressing this that being said you probably have to hold it for some amount of time uh so it's probably a nonissue but seems a little bit sketch hey look at that actually the switch is picking up now here let's click set up appears to have been factory reset do you want to set up this device again yes is currently assigned to another user's account this can happen if the previous owner of this device has not deleted this device from their account do you want to request permission to use this device oh okay yeah I guess it's software drmed with their Cloud hosting even though I reset it I don't know how I feel about that I mean it's good from the perspective of it getting stolen and not being able to reuse but also if you were to sell one of these and not reset it from your account that would be not great they tested it in the lab and that's why it was adopted to somebody's account they reset it and now we are in it also has a software update but this time I'm going to roll because I want to know how fast it updates so there we go update click let's see oh there's a little no way there's no way it was that fast update 100% complete it says bullsh I'll refresh let's see no it still says 100% complete I don't know about this Chief the update status went away oh I think it's rebooting now that's pretty fast let's see how fast it reboots though yeah I don't have internet anymore that makes sense internet gone no I have to connect to the neighbor's Wi-Fi now the signal sucks okay I'm doing stuff now Blinky blink hey there we go okay a couple minutes pretty pretty fast pretty respectable let's take a look at what the switch features are really quick okay open it up there I see the ports in a very condensed manner power cycle the poe that's good I can click on individual ports I can set the native VLAN the tagged allowed vlans Poe speed isolation a download upload limit a voice VLAN Loop detection storm control Mac control seems like most of the things here oh it even has 802.1x uh so you can do network access control that's pretty cool I can mirror ports combine them I don't know what this color stuff is what does this even mean colors are a way to group specific APS together APS will only broadcast these Wi-Fi networks that match their configured colors both APS and Wi-Fi networks can be part of multiple colors and groups okay so that's basically AP groups that's what the colors mean they probably should have just called it groups and given the groups colors rather than calling them colors but here we are I can set vlans I can select all it's it's pretty much what you would expect it feels very new like this is software has existed for I don't know you know a year and they've got all the features in there but maybe the layout and whatever isn't the most optimal yet but it seemingly Works link lights hey you can turn them off let's try it hey look at that the link lights are off that's a good feature LED white red oo I can change the color let's go green eh ah green I wish it had a screen but the green is cool too so overall I mean I'm pretty stoked that there's another competitor in this kind of price point and space for small businesses and kind of like Enthusiast at home where you want more control over your stuff I look forward to when there's a local self- hostable controller I know that that's in beta right now but we'll have to see how that goes don't really like that it was DRM to another account as physical Hardware really wish that wasn't a thing maybe the local controller will make that not a problem but overall it cool it's a very responsive dashboard that much I like like look at this this is like a live feed of what's going on like the ibiquity one is pretty responsive but this is this might be another League especially considering it's currently cloud-based it's pretty impressive if you like this video like it get subscribed um April fools by the way we're not actually moving into the house we're not actually doing short circuit from a cold cold tub thank gosh\n"