Product Reviews

Since the standard was finally ratified last year, we've seen a mixed bag of products supporting the 802.3af PoE (Power over Ethernet) specification. With the 2600-PWR family of switches, HP is staking a claim in the budget end of the market.

The 2626-PWR on review offers 24 ports exclusively for 10/100BaseTX and a pair of dual-function ports supporting either 1000BaseT copper or fibre gigabit Ethernet uplinks. The dual-speed ports provide 48V over the same wire pairs as used for data delivery, so end devices can be connected directly to the switch and powered using a single cable. Being fully 802.3af compliant, mid-span devices contain automatic detection circuits that prevent them from sending power to non-compliant

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terminal devices. So only those that present an authenticated PoE signature will receive power.

The 2626-PWR's installation routine doesn't stray from HP's well-trodden path, as you simply provide the switch with an IP address using the CLI and then move over to web browser management. As we've pointed out on numerous occasions, HP's management tools are some of the best on the market, however, we were surprised to find that they offer no access to the PoE settings. Although, you can manage the switch using the bundled ProCurve Manager utility instead.

However, only the CLI provides a link to the PoE settings, allowing you to see total consumption, those ports providing power and, where possible, which PoE devices are connected. We tested the ports with several PoE compliant devices including a 3Com LAN Access Point 8250 and found they all functioned perfectly, although the switch was unable to identify them. You can enable and disable power on individual ports, set per-port priorities for allocating power and include a threshold that will trigger an alert if total consumption exceeds this value.

The 2626-PWR looks good value, but unless you're restricted to HP we'd recommend checking out 3Com's Switch 4400 PWR as it costs slightly less and offers better browser-based PoE features.