Is this even real?
I remember getting the message about this and being like, but actually I kind of like
it. And if you're wondering what I'm referencing, this seemingly ordinary network switch, the
24 port ubiquity switch has RGB.
And not just like it has lights, every single one of these RJ45 ports has RGB lighting.
For why? Because why not? That's exactly why.
But also so you can like show what devices are in there and what's connected.
But damn it, it sounds so cool.
We've got standard ubiquity accessory package here, crack that open, hardware kit, that's
going to be your rack ear thingies. This is the fancy locking cable that they seem to be including on most of their switches
these days. And then there are the little rack ears.
I'm expecting in here that this is going to look pretty much the same as previous ubiquity
switches. I don't think you're going to be able to see, I mean I don't know, I haven't really looked
at it that closely. Let's see, maybe you can tell that they're different.
I guess it's got to be transparent in some capacity. Oh yeah, oh yeah.
You see in there? You see how it's white in the back? You can see that, right?
This is an Enterprise XG24.
It's black in the back because RGB.
Before we continue much further, I should probably introduce this switch.
This is the new Pro Max 24 PoE, part of their new Pro Max lineup, just like the iPhone.
Yep, it's almost like the CEO used to work at Apple or something.
You can see right there, it even says USW Pro Max.
I'm going to be honest, I feel like ubiquity's lineup is getting a little bit confusing.
You have like the old switches, which are listed as like in brackets Gen 1 on their website.
You have the Pro series, you have Enterprise, you have Pro Max now, you have, I think, what
else is there? There's got to be more. Oh, there's even standard.
I forgot about the standard ones. There's so many fricking switches.
There's even aggregation, which is confusing because one of the aggregations is a pro aggregation
and the other is just an aggregation. Is that one a standard product line item and that one a pro product line item?
I don't know. The point I'm trying to get across here is I'm just confused.
I'm going to put that aside for now and just focus on the things we do understand, like
what kind of ports are on this switch. We have eight PoE plus ports over here.
These just run a gigabit. We've got another eight PoE plus plus ports.
So those are, you know, a fair bit of wattage compared to these.
And then we have PoE plus plus 2.5 gig, which is something I've been wanting to see on a
ubiquity switch for a while now. And the reason for that is we have 2.5 gig U6 Enterprise access points.
So if I want to run those at 2.5 gig and also have PoE plus plus, I have to do that on two
different switches, at least up until now.
And then over here, we've got two 10 gig ports, pretty standard on a switch of this tier.
I like that compared to some of their previous 24 port PoE switches, all of the ports are
in a single line like this. So if we're using little cables to go into a patch panel, that's the next racking it
up. You don't have to like run cables like they just go one, one, one, one, one, nice and
smooth, which makes sense because it seems like a big part of this switch is, well, looks
given the RGB. We're going to turn that on soon. We've got their standard screen over there.
I'll rip the little sticker off and around back. We've got the AC power port.
That's the locking style I mentioned earlier. And then this guy, which is like a DC power in that they use with their redundant power
setup. I really wish I would stop seeing this and just give me just give me two of these two
power supplies on the enterprise line. Maybe please got the little Unify Express.
It's a gateway and an AP in one.
And then our XG24, we're wired up to Ethernet.
So, oh, what did it do thing? Oh, it's doing things. That's so cool.
It's not going to make your games run faster, your downloads go faster or your network
more stable unless I guess you had like a really bad switch before.
But there is some utility to this. It's not just a looks cool gimmick.
Imagine you had a rack full of switches and you're like, damn, where is that device?
And you could just click on the port and go blink.
I mean, yeah, you can blink a switch port normally, but imagine all of the other
switches are blinking, right? Well, now there's a second light that's a lot bigger and more obvious.
Or you have, you know, a poop mix of like, I got APs spread across and I've got, you
know, access control spread across all of these, you know, hundreds of ports.
You can have them color coded. So say your APs are set to purple and your access control is set to yellow and
then normal devices are set to black or what about this?
Hey, VLAN configuration. Oh, that port set to the security VLAN.
It's just an easy visual thing. And to ubiquities point, there was a lot of people just being like, haha, that's
a stupid gimmick, but like who cares? It's, it's just a bonus feature.
The problem with this product.
It's not really their fault. And I don't really know that there was a way around it.
If you have normal Ethernet cables like this one that are blue, have a blue boot,
you can't see this one's not so bad because it's clear on this end.
I did try to find a cable. Oh, yeah, here, this is actually one of ubiquities own patch cables.
So talk about thinking ahead. Hey, so you plug that one in.
You actually, you can't see anything. Well, okay, you can, you can, but it's definitely not as cool as this one where
it's fully transparent and you can see through. So if you're thinking about buying one of these switches, because you like RGB,
consider the fact that you might have to replace literally all of your cables.
While this is a transparent one that works decently well, it's not the most
optimal ubiquity cell specific ether lighting cables, which is what they're
calling this RGB system that are translucent.
So they kind of catch some of the light and diffuse it.
That's going to give you the best effect for sure. These ones actually look okay because I just see it kind of bouncing off.
And this one actually is the hardest to see, but also studio lights.
Can we, can we, can we turn them off for a second?
Oh, it looks pretty cool, man.
It's not useless if you don't have the special cables, but it is definitely not
as good as long as you don't have patch cables that are, are 100% opaque.
It's interesting that the default is just strobing white.
You notice the, the port LEDs aren't on.
You see how there's LEDs up here to like indicate a connection.
They're off down here. Are any of them on? I'm very curious to see what options it gives you for like automatic colors.
Like for an LACP link, if you had, you know, a few cables that were, see,
at four cables that were in an aggregate link, you could just be like,
I want those ones to be green. And then the other aggregate link, how those ones are purple, you know,
there's lots of different ways to skin this cat.
That's such a horrible saying. There are also three other switches in the lineup.
A 48 port, a 48 port with PoE and a 24 port that isn't PoE will show their
specs on the screen somewhere.
Here you go. Come on, turn on for f***s sake.
Hey, oh my God. Why are those ones blue?
Okay. The coloring right now, I'm looking at, am I screen recording?
I'm screen recording. The coloring I'm, I'm seeing right now seems to correspond with the
fact that they're 2.5 gig. It's matching what is shown here.
If I go to settings, I have two options, neither of them are selected.
I can do speed or network and I can set brightness, colors, default.
Let's try green.
Oh yeah, there we go. That is not the green I selected.
Maybe not the highest CRI LEDs. Let's try purple.
Hey, okay, that looks pretty cool.
You know what? I want to see, what does it look like with the wrong cables?
Much less cool with not the right cables. Transparent cables, much better.
All right, I can do speed too. Okay, if I switch to speed, this is cool.
You can set the color of each speed.
You see that? They added RGB to that port. Good job, ubiquity.
Okay, let's see. Hey, look at that. That's pretty responsive.
Now, can I set a specific port to a color?
I was kind of expecting more customizability.
I'm not going to lie. In the present state, it's pretty basic.
You can set it based on your VLAN, like your native untagged network, or you
can set it based on speed. What I was talking about before about changing the port color to be based on
the type of device that's connected doesn't seem to be a thing.
It's only network and speed.
And I can't also just like go in and say, I want this one to be that color.
Okay, that's locate right there. That's pretty helpful.
If you had a rack full of switches and you're not really sure which one is which
and you were just like, ah, show me that one.
That's pretty good. It would be cool if you have like 10 of these switches and you did this.
It shut all of them off and just blinked to the one. I don't have another switch to test that, but if that's not the functionality,
they should, they should change that. I feel like it's probably just that it's early stages and more of these kind of
ideas and features will get added later on to make this more useful.
It's got most of the usefulness so far by device type would be nice.
And being able to dislike paint colors as I want would also be cool.
Maybe I have certain things plugged in that it wouldn't recognize as a device
type like say, I don't know. I have these ones are computers and these ones are wall ports and whatever.
And I want to color it myself. It would be good to be able to do that.
If I pick the closest other switch, they have feature wives, the pro 24 P O E,
which has been around for a while. They're both layer three capable, have 400 Watts of power output, have the same
amount of ports, they both have the 10 gigs here and then 24 other ports.
It's a hundred US dollars more for this one, but you're also getting 2.5 gig
on eight of the ports. That's pretty much, oh yeah, you also get more P O E plus plus ports, although
you don't necessarily have more power budget to use it per se.
It doesn't seem to be ridiculously more expensive or anything.
I mean, a hundred US dollars, I could easily see a network vendor charging
just for the fact that it has eight 2.5 gig ports. Like I could totally see that.
But overall, I mean, it's cool. They should just put this on all of the switches as long as it doesn't really
increase the price. Hopefully we can get translucent cables that work good with it from other
vendors for less money. And hopefully they make the software more flexible.
I really want to be able to just like paint them any color I want or set it by
device or adjust the effect.
Maybe I just want my switch to be like rainbow. They have that in the product photo, you know, when you adopted it, it was like
rainbow. Why doesn't it do that? I don't know what happened.
Oh my God, thank you. Oh, I updated to the next version, which is like 0.02 higher.
And now I can turn off breathing mode. This looks way better like this.
I'd probably wait a few more months and see what sort of features they enable,
but it's cool. And just props to ubiquity for trying to do something a little bit different in
a market segment that just like doesn't change at all. Like, oh, there's the faster ports.
Woo. So if you liked this video and other networking videos, hit the like button,
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