It's not impossible to buy for the future but it's silly to try to do so. You can build a reasonable PC every single year and save yourself money versus buying one super computer ever couple years. It keeps the parts fresh and you free of worries that it will leave you with a dead hard drive or something.
Based on your setup, I really don't see any need for any of the features you have mentioned. I bought two 24port 10m switches at a con for $50 recently and I'm sure these will fill almost all of my needs. The debate of 10 vs 100 can be made but unless you're doing a lot of intranetwork traffic, then you don't need anything over 10. If you can find a deal on a 10/100, then by all means purchase it. And VOIP traffic doesn't count for intranetwork traffic. Find something for under $50 and use it for a while. You might even look for the Cisco 10m switch on ebay(1900 series I think) or find a decent deal on a 24port 10/100 Linksys. There is really no need for POE as you don't have the devices to support it and there's no telling whether the standards will change(we hope not) but it's still in infancy for such a pricey piece of hardware, yet un-needed in your network. QOS in your network shouldn't be relavent either with so few phones and I would assume you have network traffic to match it. The only time this would help is if you were downloading a nice chunk of data and were talking on the phone. I would think you should be able to get by unless: A) Your connection is too slow to do much more than voip B) The codec you're using isn't friendly to your connection. As I mentioned in the start of this email, you won't need any of these features for some time anyways. Find something that will adequately get you by for a reasonable price(under $50). In a few years when these features are a little more mainstream, as in supported by most switches on the market, you can snag one up for $100 and use all the features. This is just my two cents(or more) on the situation. I do feel it would be in your best interest to buy something more tuned for your needs but what do I know. People buy pickup trucks without ever planning on hauling anything. Mark On 4/21/06, Nathan C. Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Since I am buying for future 5-9 years, I am considering havving at > > least some of the ports to support POE(power over ethernet) in > > anticipation of goodies in future might need this feature. > > > > Rich > > This really falls outside the scope of the list. > > You probably will be fine without QoS. I was on my 10 mbit network. I > would think 100 mbit switch without QoS will probably be enough unless you > are pumping a lot of big files and video over your network. The places that > should support QoS are your bottlenecks, like your interface to the > Internet. > > Also, none of your current devices support PoE right now, so why bother with > it? Get a cheap switch now. They keep coming down in price and gigabit is > becoming more prevalent every day. > > PoE is really nice *if* you have devices that support it. > > Good luck. > > -Nate > _______________________________________________ > Astlinux-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.kriscompanies.com/mailman/listinfo/astlinux-users > > Donations to support AstLinux are graciously accepted via PayPal to [EMAIL > PROTECTED] > _______________________________________________ Astlinux-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.kriscompanies.com/mailman/listinfo/astlinux-users Donations to support AstLinux are graciously accepted via PayPal to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
