 Today's unboxing is an 8 port gigabit switch from Linksys. And since pretty much everyone knows what Linksys is and what their value add is, and since everyone pretty much knows that there's not a whole lot of variation when it comes from switch to switch, other than power consumption and reliability, I'm just going to talk about more than anything else what you really need a switch for. So first of all let's see what Linksys has to say for themselves. Plug and play, I certainly hope so. 8 gigabit ports, up to 10 times faster than 10 hundred. And QoS enabled, that's kind of neat. And power savings, so yes this is more of a green smart power switch. So smart power for short cable runs, which basically turns down the transmission power when it detects a short cable. And auto power down disables unused ports, so that does help you consume less energy with your switch than you otherwise would. Port status switch gives you control over LED lights, neat. Okay auto sensing ports work with 10 hundred networks, they better. And you get award winning 24 seven support for the first 90 days. So if you plug in your switch and you're having trouble with it, at least there's someone to call other than me, you can call Cisco and they can help you. You'd be surprised how many people message me and ask me stuff like, you know, my switch isn't working, what do I do? And I'm like, I don't know man, I don't know your network, I don't know what you're trying to do, I don't know what kind of switch you have. Yeah, anyway, comes with a power cord, comes with this quick start guide, comes with a product information thing. Yeah, I guess I wasn't really expecting much more to be included with this. So what do you need a switch for? So a switch is basically a way of splitting in a more intelligent manner a network connection. So here, perfect example is right here actually. Okay, my main network hub is in the other room, so like one room over there. And what I have there is I have my modem from Shaw and then I have my router which has four ports and then I have a switch. And that switch plugs into the power line kit that's going downstairs, it plugs into the two computers that are in that room. I have a spare coming off when I need to plug something in temporarily. I have one that goes into the room on this side for my Windows home server and I have one that comes actually here, check this out, right over here. I have one that comes in through the wall, very elegantly by the way, that runs to this wireless router right here. Now I'm no longer using this for its wireless capability, I've actually turned off the routing and turned off the wireless and I'm just using it as a switch because it's a four port switch. So that way I have one incoming, I have one going out to the test bench and then I have one going out to my work laptop whenever I'm doing work from home in this room. So that's what a switch does, you basically take one gigabit backbone and then you run that out to a bunch of other gigabit things. So the way that these computers or devices are going to communicate with each other is let's say your connection to the main network, your main gigabit network is through one. That means that a computer plugged into port two can communicate via gigabit to that network. However if you have three computers in ports two, three and four and they all need to communicate with something on the other side, so through here, then you're going to be limited to total gigabit speed with three. So that is sort of theoretical, 333 megabits per second. However, computer two could talk to computer four at full gigabit speed. So what you're doing is you're creating like a sort of a sub gigabit network that then has one gigabit link to the rest of your, in theory, fully gigabit network. So this is the SE2800, it is a pretty plain looking little box, it's got a Cisco logo on the front, it's got some ventilation holes all the way around the outside of the chassis, it's got a power indicator as well as power in and the ability to turn the lights on and off in theory. It's got eight ports, these are all gigabit as I've covered several times so far, and it has ventilation on the bottom. So we've got little feet here so that it sits a little bit off the table or floor or wherever you put it, and then you're going to have natural convection drawing air through the bottom and then out the side. So thank you for checking out my unboxing of the SE2800. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer Maybe news sea API warnings for lessò