The Internet has become an important part of our daily lives. In order to make life more convenient, there are various network devices on the market, such as IP phone, wireless access point and IP camera. These devices not only need to get the network through the Ethernet cable, but also need to get the power through the wire. When the number of devices is large, the wiring will be complicated. How to solve this problem?
Recently, PoE (Power over Ethernet) technology has been widely used, which can transmit power and network simultaneously through a single Ethernet cable. PoE devices include power sourcing equipment (PSE) and powered devices (PD). PSE is a device for transmitting power, and then PoE switches and PoE injectors are PSEs. Devices that receive electricity are called PDs. People often ask: PoE switch vs. PoE injector: Which one should choose? This article will compare these two PSEs to help you make a choice.
What is a PoE switch?
PoE network switches or Power over Ethernet switches are built-in PoE injection network switches. Therefore, it can transmit both power and network to the PD directly connected to it through a single Ethernet cable. PoE network switches are considered to be one of the smartest ways to invest in your network system.
PoE switches are mainly used with IP cameras, VoIP phones and wireless access points (WAP). You can usually buy 4/8/16/24/48 port PoE switches. PoE network switches can be divided into many types, such as unmanaged, managed PoE switches, outdoor PoE switches, industrial-grade switches, and 800m long-distance PoE switches. PoE switches provide power and establish network connections for IP cameras that support PoE through network cables such as Cat5, Cat5e and Cat6.
What is PoE Injector?
Power injectors are also called PoE injectors or midspans. They are small, simple hardware devices connected to your network, allowing you to power other devices through your network. There are two types of PoE injectors, including passive PoE injector and active PoE injector.
In order to add PoE to conventional non-PoE network connections, PoE injectors are often used. Although all ports of PoE switches can be used for power supply and network transmission, some older switches without PoE function cannot be used with PoE devices because they can only transmit network but not power. Fortunately, if you just want to use PoE technology, you don’t need to upgrade all your existing switches to PoE-compatible switches. Compared to replacing your original network infrastructure, PoE injector is a cheap and easy way to allow some PoE devices to be used with non-PoE switches.
The injector injects power into the data obtained from the non-PoE switch and transmits the power and network to the PD through a single Ethernet cable (such as Cat5e and Cat6 cable). The two main benefits of using power injectors in your network are cost and flexibility.
PoE switch vs. PoE injector: The choice depends on network requirements.
Among the two PoE PSE devices mentioned above, PoE network switches are currently the most commonly used devices. Because of its high efficiency and cost-saving advantages, PoE switches are often the first choice when planning to establish a PoE network for homes or offices.
However, before PoE switches became popular, non-PoE switches were usually used in home or office network construction. When you need to add some PDs with PoE to these network systems, what would you do? In this case, you don’t need to discard the existing non-PoE switch and buy the new ones with PoE. PoE injectors can be added to each PD, saving you the trouble of upgrading switches. However, it should be noted that the PoE injector is only suitable for PoE network systems with a few PDs. If you want to add dozens of PDs, it is more appropriate to choose a PoE switch.
As the company continues to expand and homes become more and more intelligent, PoE switches are an effective part of taking your network in the right direction. Any network device that requires a small amount of power to operate and communicate on the network can be plugged into the PoE switch. PoE injectors can still meet some special needs. The latest IEEE802.3 bt standard can provide 95W high power, and the 95W PoE injector is a good choice without changing the existing network infrastructure. 10G PoE injector is another device that injects power into a 10G network. So how to choose PoE switch and PoE injector depends on the actual situation. The PoE switch has integrated the power supply in the switch, and the PoE injector is used as a power supply that can increase the power to the twisted wire and transmit the network and power to the front-end IP devices.