New Switch for Small Office

pclancy

Work at a small office with 16 desktop clients and 4 servers, we're finding a lot of issues with using Webex and Skype of late probably due to our little HP 1410 switch. We've got a decent Internet connection (10Mbps) but use a lot of cloud services, remote desktop and Voip. Webex in particular struggles sometimes.

I'm thinking there are two bottlenecks, our old TP-Link ADSL gateway which is providing wireless, DHCP/DNS to all clients (even though we using Fibre now instead), and the HP switch.

I'm on the lookout now for a decent 24 or 32 port switch thats managed and will help us with our Voip experience hopefully through better QOS. Also might see can we design three Vlans of sorts to segregate traffic. Plus give us additional ports for new staff and let others get off wireless.

So wondering what peoples experiences and recommendations for a new switch would be? and am I right to think its the switch or the old tp-link router that might be our bottlenecks?

gctest50

I'd think it'd down to both : they kinda belong to the days of answering emails and small bit of web browsing.
The TP-link is probably running tight on memory and resources, the HP is just shunting packets quick as its able to - not knowing it'd be great to prioritise the more sensitive voice traffic

ressem

I'd guess that the TP-Link is the more likely bottleneck of the two, especially if there are a lot of connections from wireless to local servers.

If you have time to spare and no budget to spend, and you have an old desktop pentium 4 or better lying around + a second network card, you can download Vyatta.org or Untangle.com (if you dislike the command line) as a reasonably performing replacement router (for a small business) for a pittance, or just to narrow down the problem's cause before spending money.

More specific model numbers for both devices would help, as there are modern 1410s which would cope adequately.

rolion

My personal way of setting up a network is by split the function(s) one-to-one per device:

-ADSL modem,doing only adsl modem job,in bridge mode
-WAN / Cable Router,doing the ADSL PPoE and IP routing
-WiFi Router / AP doing the Wireless job
-switch,1GB ports doing the switching job

In your case,with a 10M connection AND using Mr Cloud so intensive...what do you expect !? That 10m (which i guess is shared and it gives less than that,maybe 5-8M up and less than 1M down at the top) is overly used !

VLANs for what !? External traffic or internal traffic !? Forget it...

Get few more devices and split their functionality as per above setup.
Brand names,forget it ,their are all made in same place just having a different colored case ! I know,maybe not so true...

Get a second broadband line,maybe from Imagine,at 6/6M SDSL (you need SDSL for some intensive AV / VoIP applications) and segment the traffic based on the source and/or destination.

Get a proper router (Sonicwall came in my mind) that has additional services that allows you and enable traffic monitoring by IP,source,destination...you can have a malware eating you lovely 10M...


Have fun...
Regards

pclancy

Its actually Fibre and approx 9.5Mbps up and down.

Went ahead and ordered 100Mit connection so hopefully that will solve our Webex problems, I've been monitoring the traffic on the router and its normally not too bad except when we do Webex sessions. Think i'll leave the router as is for now, have enabled QOS too but dont know if its clever enough to recognize voip packets.

What 24 port switch would people recommend these days?