Review on Zyxel 24 Gigabit Managed Rackmount GS1900 24E by John Mceachern

This is a first review of the GS1900-8 and GS1900-24E switches. As I'm adding these switches to my network and spending a few weeks using them, I'll update this review. I bought these switches to replace some of the old unmanaged Netgear switches I used to connect my Sonos players and video streaming devices to my computer. LAN. I wanted managed switches to support STP (Spanning Tree Protocol), control each port, and use SNMP. These switches hit the spot in terms of features and price, and have generally received good reviews online. I'm initially rating these switches two stars based on the horrible experience I had with them trying to use both the web admin interface and the Zyxel ZON utility. (Windows only) to update firmware and configure switches. All switches are delivered with firmware version 2.20 as standard. This is a firmware version from 2016 (two years ago). I couldn't see most of the words in the admin web interface on my Mac with Safari, Chrome or Firefox and on Windows 10 with Chrome. I could only see the words using Internet Explorer on a Windows 10 system, but the firmware update through the web interface kept failing. So I downloaded the ZON utility and ran it on my Windows 10 system and after many tries I was able to update all four switches to version 2.40 using a locally downloaded firmware file without using the remote option that leads to the website (Zyxel website? I don't know). It was a very painful process. I had to factory reset each switch (although they looked brand new and had never been used) then I had to use ZON to update each switch individually rather than trying to select all four switches and update them in one operation like the ZON utility to update . you should be able to. After the update was complete I cycled all the switches off and back on and then tried using the ZON utility to set up things like the system name and location, but this operation still failed when using ZON, even though I tried to set up the switch over WiFi. and via a wired Ethernet port from my Windows 10 system. I eventually gave up the ZON utility and used the web admin interface to manually configure each switch. It worked, sometimes the switch stopped responding to configuration changes and I had to turn it off and on again. Maybe I just have four faulty switches ;-) but be prepared for some trouble updating and configuring these things. So my first impression is that upgrading and managing the switches, even with Zyxel's own utility, was a pain in the ass and I was about to hit the return this item button on Revain and get some Netgear or Cisco to buy switches. Firmware v2.40 appears to have improved the management experience somewhat, but the ZON utility still gave multiple timeout and error displays when attempting to perform basic management operations such as setting the location of the switch. While I appreciate Zyxel's efforts to develop a unified switch management tool, the fact that such a tool fails more often than it succeeds means I will be quick to abandon this tool and let others in my community know that they are shouldn't count on being able to manage it all, their Zyxels switch from one unified tool. UPDATE 6/23/18: Downgraded to 1 star because Zyxel has not responded to multiple contact attempts, as reported by a Zyxel representative in this review thread.