TP-LINK TL-SF1005D 5-Port 10/100 Mbps Unmanaged Desktop Switch - White with EU Plug

Recommending. Bought this after so much research and stress about what wold work well with our house. Although positioned about 13 meters from the main router (fibre connect), it picks up great signal and has improved data connectivity to the bottom of the garden.

Really good product.

Not used since particular situation needs stronger wireless signal from main router

First of all: For the pedantic bolts out there, I will be using simple maths for network speeds as this review is for the average person out there not network engineers lol. To indicate you don't actually you need the expensive 1 gigabit switches if your internal network doesn't require them or your internet connection is below 80 Megabits. Any cheap gigabit switch will do or Megabit switch if you come across one for less than a few quid (esp if you have a very slow internet connection).Have been using the: 'TP-LINK TL-SF1005D 5-Port 10/100 Mbps Unmanaged Desktop Switch' since 21 July 2016 and yes that's right I've been using a 100 Mbps switch for over 9 years and it cost £6.49 at time of purchase and at the time 1 gigabit switchs were fairly expensive.Subsequent TP-Link products bought have not lasted this long let alone 18 months. The NETGEAR JWNR2010-100UKS Wireless N300Mbps router I bought at the time didn't last that long either.Important note: Most likely the internal components will have changed as I don't think TP-Link will be using the same components as they were 9 years ago as manufacturing and nodes for chips have changed drastically since then. So, your mileage will vary.Okay, down to the key reasons why I'm still using this cheap switch.1) It's taken aeons for ISPs to actually offer anything that will saturate a 100 Mbps switch. I'm currently on 80 Mbps down / 20 Mbps up and after the usual signal degradation of infrastructure it's about 73 down and 16 up. Still not maxing out the switch.2) For internal file transfers, it's good enough as can just initiate a transfer, play a game, watch a movie or do chores.3)If it ain't broke, don't fix and even I gave this to a charity shop it would end up in a landfil anyway as people are misguided into thinking they are getting 1 Gigabit speeds because the PC tells them the link speed is 1 Gigabit and there's all the marketing b.s.To work out a close approximation of your actual speed you divide a the speed in bits by 8 to the speed in Bytes (or 1 bit divided by 8 = 0.125 Bytes). So for me that 10 MegaBytes down and 2.5 MegaByte Up doesn't sound as impressive as 80 / 20 does it? haha....So this 10 Mbps /100 Mbps speed can do 1.25 MBps / 12.5 MBps. So a 1 Gigabit (1000 Bits approx) connection works out roughly as 125 MegaBytes. Unfortunately, ISPs are sneaky in using Megabits and MegaBytes interchangeably as Megabytes.Simple rule of thumb: Mb (Megabits) is not the same MB (Megabytes) and divide the speed in Mb to get rough speed in MB. Same applies to Gb (Gigabits) and GB (GigaBytes).

Got this a few days ago, after a previous wifi extender just stopped working after a couple of years, and that supplier was pretty inept at offering solutions other than 'contact the seller'! I've tried a number of extenders in the past, many just not acceptable at all, and were returned for refund.It seemed impossible to get this TP-Link to initialise, and I tried various ways. So I sought online for troubleshooting solutions, and one was to download their 'Tether' app to my phone. That worked seamlessly right away, asking for my Wifi network password, and device to connect, and it was all set up in a few minutes.So I moved it to the bedroom where my desk is located. This is the dead area, that CAN connect to the living room router, but not consistently. In the bathroom next door it doesn't connect about 95% of the time. When I CAN connect my laptop to my router, speeds are up to about 140 Mbps. Now with the extender, I can get this speed but more usually it's in the 50-80 range. If the router connection is slower (like at peak times), the extender is always faster than the long connection. Works very well in the bathroom too.So it's an improvement on the inconsistent direct connection and much more accessible.Only niggly thing Is that if my phone connects to it and I move back into the living room, it doesn't always switch back to the direct connection [showing xxxxx_EXT instead of just xxxxx], and even vice versa, so I have to check at times that it's on the nearer one. That might just be my phone. But for the static laptop, this is no problem.If this stops working at any point, I'll come back to downgrade the review. (Oct. 24)Update: 18/11/24. I wasn't getting great results from this. I was due an upgrade on my Wifi from 125 to 250, so I thought that would help. Not that much. While the booster is consistent in providing connection, the speeds were consistently between 20 and 30! Just not enough to make the price of this purchase worth it. Returned for a refund, and the engineer who upgraded the broadband told me to get a mesh instead of a booster; always better, and solves the problem of switching between the main and the extension, as it's all under the same network name. I've done that, and speeds are consistently higher now, over 50 up into the 70s.

I don’t normally review on Amazon but for this I have it. Before the extender the speeds I was getting was around 20 megabits per second on a good day and now with the extender than an Ethernet cable my speeds have gone up to 400 megabits per second. For anyone that had WiFi like mine I definitely recommend you get this. The setup is easy as well and should take less than 10 minutes for the whole thing not to mention the price point for this which isn’t that bad.

I'd say overall this is a great product and once you have it set up, you're good to go. I've increased my speed from 50-60mbps to 250mbps+ using this device. It does take a little know how to set up though as there were IP settings that needed changing in my case to get a stable connection. So in most cases, it may be plug and play once you've set up WPS. It's a big device but it makes sense for it to extend the connection well.