StarTech.com Unmanaged 2.5G Switch - 5 Port Gigabit Switch - 2.5GBASE-T Unmanaged Ethernet Switch - Ethernet Splitter - Din Rail or Wall Mount - Multi-Gigabit - Auto-MDIX - 9K Jumbo

Product Overview

AI-generated summary

For £45.25 ex‑VAT, this is a sensible little “workhorse” switch for small installs where you just need cheap, reliable extra ports—think office desks, home office setups with multiple wired devices, or a patching point for APs/NAS/VoIP phones that don’t need any fancy configuration. Because it’s unmanaged, it’s also the right choice when you want plug‑and‑play and minimal faff for someone who’ll just deploy it and forget it. The multi‑gig support is especially useful if you’ve got a couple of devices that are already using 2.5G (or soon will), without forcing you to move everything up to 10G.

That said, I wouldn’t buy this for environments that need management, VLANs, monitoring, or traffic control—unmanaged means you’re not going to fix “why is this noisy/slow” problems with settings. Also, a 5‑port unit is great as a local splitter, but it’s not a core switch replacement—once you start daisy‑chaining, performance and troubleshooting become your problem. If your use case is “add a few wired connections in a tidy DIN/wall-mounted spot, with decent future‑proofing at 2.5G,” then it’s good value. If you need network governance or scale, look at a managed switch instead.