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Written by Davey McWatters
Monday, May 26, 2003
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Introduction
As more and more home users begin to switch over from their 56k dial-up connections to broadband internet access, home networking becomes increasingly popular. As popularity rises, demand for networking products for consumers increases and more companies start developing products to feed the market. More competition designing home networking devices means cheaper prices for end users. Any average computer user nowadays can easily network their entire home with a solution that best meets their needs for a very affordable sum of money.
Compex isn’t the most recognizable name in the home networking market, but they definitely offer some great products that compete well against their competitors. Today we will be taking a look at the PS2216 16 port switch.
The Switch
The PS2216 is a 16 port switch; however, it is not your everyday home networking switch. It provides several features that are unseen in more popular switches. Some of these features port trunking as well as VLAN support. As you can see LED indicators are available for power, and link/activity, and speed for each port. Both features will be discussed more thoroughly later in the article.
The PS2216 is very compact for the average 16 port switch that could be used for home or large businesses. It is a 10/100 compliant switch complying with IEEE standards 802.3 10Base-T, 802.3u 100Base-TX, and 802.3x flow control. It supports both full and half duplex modes of flow control. The switch also offers a 3.2Gbps backplane, unlike hubs and repeaters which simply only offer 100Mbps for the entire range of ports, the PS2216 is able to offer a full bandwidth of 200Mbps for each port on the switch. A store and forward switching method is utilized by the switch, which allows for better error correction than some other switching methods such as cut-through.
From this angle the switch looks very similar to most other 16 port switches available. As you can see, there are two rows of eight ports in each row. The ports are the standard RJ45 ethernet ports.
The above image shows the dip switches a user would use to configure their switch based on their networking needs. Granted most home users are not going to need to use these features and will be fine leaving them at the default option of disabled, larger businesses and/or geeks who just like to play around with their new equipment might want to mess around with the different available configurations to optimize their home network.
The switches are labeled quite well; the first two allow you to enable trunking on ports 1, 2, 9, and 10 or ports 7, 8, 15, and 16. The third switch enables priority mode on ports 8 and 16 which will give them priority over the other ports on the switch. Lastly, we have the VLAN switch; it enables a separate VLAN on each port 2-15 and sets port 1 as the common port of the switch. 
Port trunking allows a user to connect four ports one each of two switches together and creates a single high bandwidth link between the two switches. Instead of connecting switches through a standard uplink or crossover cable you can connect with four separate cables, giving you bandwidth of up to 800Mbps instead of a single ports 200Mbps full duplex maximum bandwidth. You cannot use trunking with any number of cables except four. Each PS2216 offers the ability to connect to two other switches via port trunking.
VLAN or virtual LAN is not very useful in the home environment. However, this would be a great feature for large businesses with many computers. VLANs reduce broadcasts sent out by workstations on a network by segmenting the LAN into separate virtual LANs. The VLAN functionality on the PS2216 allows for up to 15 different VLANs. Ports 2 through 16 are used as separate VLANs while port 1 is used as the common port on the switch.
Conclusion
The PS2216 has surprised me with the overall features and amount of ports available on the very affordable unit with an MSRP of only $89.95. It can be found online for even cheaper than that, coming in at around $65 at some retailers. It offers features that are usually only found on expensive corporate switches. Compex has done a great job designing this product for the home user as well as making it appeal to larger businesses. It would make an excellent switch for LAN parties. You can plug your dedicated game server into port 8 or 16 and flip the priority switch and your server will get bandwidth priority over all other ports on the switch.
If you are in the market for a new switch for your home network, large business, or the occasional LAN party that needs large switches I would have trouble not recommending the PS2216 from Compex.
Pros: - 16 Ports
- Port Trunking
- Priority
- VLAN Support
- Compact Design
Cons:
Score: 9/10
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