Unmanaged Switch Series

Little More Now or a Lot More Later Post 3 of 4 "Plug and play" is a feature for exactly one person: whoever is installing it. So you save some time in commissioning. But that switch is going to sit in that panel for fifteen years, and the person who benefits from the simplicity is almost never the person who inherits the consequences. Run the numbers honestly. $99 unmanaged versus roughly $600 for a lite-managed switch. Call it $500 of difference. Now price one hour of unplanned downtime on the line that switch is serving. For most plants I work with, $500 probably doesn't cover the first ten minutes. You're not comparing $99 to $600. You're comparing $600 to a lottery ticket where the prize is a shift you can't explain to your plant manager. I understand why the cheap switch keeps winning. It wins on the only line item anyone looks at during procurement. The cost shows up in a different budget, in a different quarter, attributed to something else entirely. Cheap to buy. Expensive to own.

Little More Now or a Lot More Later Post 2 of 4 An unmanaged switch is the only critical device in your panel that cannot tell you anything substantive about itself. Your PLC has diagnostics. Your drive has fault codes. Each of them was chosen partly on how well, and typically further programmed to, reports its own health. Then there's the switch. It has…a link light. Somewhere between 70 and 80% of network problems originate at the physical layer: a marginal crimp, a bent pin, a cable run just past spec, a connector that passed on install day and has been degrading through eighteen months of vibration ever since, let alone unshielded cable in an industrial environment with high EFI or RMI again perhaps from sources that weren’t present on install day. A managed switch shows you CRC errors incrementing on port 3 and you've found it in minutes. An unmanaged switch shows you a link light. Green. It's been green the whole time. You didn't save $400. You deferred it, with interest, to whoever is standing in front of that panel at 2am.

Little More Now or a Lot More Later Post 1 of 4 I hold a position many in our space think is extreme: I don't think there's a good reason to install an unmanaged switch in an industrial application anymore. Not "rarely." I mean I struggle to construct the case. Hear me out. Not every location justifies a $2,000–$5,000 fully managed switch. I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing the floor is in the wrong place. Right now the floor is a $99 five-port unmanaged switch and this floor is used FREQUENTLY. Looking at options in September 2026, you could move that floor to $600-$800 and still hit fully managed in some cases, even light layer 3 in others and for plenty of applications a lite managed or smart switch for sub $500 that offer a LOT of value. Think about what that switch is supporting. PLCs, HMIs, Drives, IO. Equipment with an often fifteen-year service life and production consequences measured in dollars per minute. Those components get selected carefully. Then we connect them all with the cheapest possible device that has no way to tell us anything meaningful about itself. I have a blog post with the criteria we use to evaluate a managed switch. My honest challenge: read that list, think about your own application, and tell me every single item is irrelevant to you. I don't think most people can. I think most people have never been given the chance to find out.