The Zyxel GS-108B v3 has just arrived. Whipped out my #1 JIS PH screwdriver - many Far East fasteners are actually JIS headed rather than Phillips. If you use a Phillips on a JIS, you run the risk of damaging the screw head. Anyhoo, I’m digressing.
The switch is relatively unremarkable looking (as most switches are), though it does have a couple of ports marked ‘high priority’ and and a couple marked ‘medium priority’ (apparently the switch has QoS enabled, even though it’s a ‘dumb’ unmanaged switch). It also comes with a lifetime warranty!
It’s supplied with a fairly standard 5V SMPS:
3 #1 JIS screws hold the lid on.
Let’s have a look inside:
Look familiar? Yup, it’s exactly the same main board as the English Electric 8switch and the Silent Angel Bonn N8 “audiophile” ethernet switches, right down to the version number.
Hans Beekhuyzen very kindly gives us a look at the internals of both switches (about 3:40 onwards) here:
The layout is interesting - rather than IC packaged chokes and transformers common to many other switches, you can see 4 discrete chokes and 4 discrete transformers for each RJ45 socket. Pretty neat for a £20 switch.
At the power socket end of the board, there’s a RS1117A voltage regulator dropping the 5V supply to 3.3V. No point adding a fancy Voodoo external LPS here when there’s an industry bog-standard regulator doing the 5V to 3.3V conversion.
So, what’s the difference between this switch at £20 and the English Electric 8 Switch (£450)/Silent Angel Bonn N8 (£395)?
The English Electric has a chunky metal case vs the Silent Angel’s stamped steel case which probably accounts for its higher price, however the only functional difference between these switches and the stock Zyxel is an additional daughter board carrying the 0.1ppm 25MHz temperature compensated crystal oscillator.
Ethernet clocks need to meet + or - 100ppm to be compliant with spec. A 0.1ppm clock doesn’t do ethernet any better. Claims are made about improved jitter, but jitter doesn’t matter over TCP/IP where data is buffered at either end.
I pity anyone who ponied up the asking price for either of these switches and even more so anyone who went the extra pounds/euros/dollhairs for the optional LPS. If you did, you’ve been well and truly had…
Credit to @Mark_Brown for giving me the idea to do this.
Anyone need a cheap but good 8-port Gbit switch with QoS? One careful owner…