YuanLey 6 Port PoE Switch – CAT6 Cable Length Test + Security Cameras

1. Right off the bat, the first thing I notice, which I’m excited about is, no clunky power adapter, it’s all built in.
2. There also appears to be no cooling fans, so no additional humming sounds in my work area. On the sides, we have screw holes for rack mounting the switch.  I wonder if this unit does get hot inside.  Here is a thermal image I took of the switch before turning it on and here is another after 10 hours of supplying power to 4 cameras.
3. On the bottom, there are the indentations for the rubber feet.
4. On the back, we have the power port and a grounding screw. It accepts an IEC power cord, which is the same fit as a PC or NVR power cord.  The 3-prong power cord is grounded, and I opened up the device to make sure it’s actually connected.  You can see the middle pin is grounded to 2 screws which are connected to the case.  Use the external earth screw for grounding if the device isn’t connected to a power outlet and devices are connected.
5. On the front, we have 4 gigabit ports. If you need more, YuanLey sells PoE switches in configurations up to 16 ports.  Gigabit ports are more than enough bandwidth to support a 4K cameras and higher.  Simply plug in your non-PoE or PoE active devices and the switch will automatically identify if the device accepts power over ethernet or not.  The ports comply with the IEEE 802.3af/at PoE power supply standards and will supply up to 30w per port which is PoE+.  This includes IP Cameras, VoIP phones and wireless access points.  On the other hand, make sure not to plug in PoE passive devices into the switch as you could damage the device.  The total usable PoE power budget across all the PoE ports is 78w.  The average dome or bullet camera users 7w.
6. Next, we have this port labeled, “uplink”. This is where you would connect the switch to your network modem, router, Network Video Recorder (NVR) or to the next branch of hardware on your network which would be sending or receiving data through all ports on the switch.  This port also supports 1 gigabyte per second transfers.  Obviously, it’s not PoE enabled.
7. Here we have an odd-looking port labeled SFP.  It’s also an uplink port used to connect the switch to your network using fiberoptics.  It’s often used to connect multiple large switches together and I like the option on this smaller switch and can stretch long distances depending on the transceiver module you use.  I wouldn’t use it in my home but if I had devices far away, like in a warehouse or a large facility, having a lighting fast connection to the switch at such a distance would be an advantage.
8. Let’s talk about this slider button here labeled V and S.  S is the standard mode where we have gigabit speeds on all ports, they can communicate with each other and the maximum length of PoE is 100m (328ft) on a standard Cat6 network cable.  V on the other hand is for Vlan or extended mode.  When active, devices plugged into the 4 ports cannot communicate or see each other.  Here is a quick example.  Here I have my router which is responsible for assigning IP addresses to connected devices.  It’s plugged into the PoE switch using the uplink port.  The switch has my PC and a PoE camera attached.  In standard mode, the PC is able to see the IP camera when I ping it.  When I activate extended vlan mode, I am no longer able to ping the camera.  Plugging my PC directly into the router however allows me to see the IP camera again because vlan mode simply prevents the main 4 ports from communicating with each other, but any networking hardware plugged into the uplink ports can see all devices attached.  Using vlans is great an untrusted environment where you have your own computer in an Internet public access area, like a guest network or hotel or library.  Or if you have multiple access points plugged into different ports and you don’t want them to cross communicate.

Alright, so I just spent the past 5 hours testing various lengths of cable and the results were pretty impressive.  Normally, the maximum length of a network cable is 100m (328ft).  I am using Cat6 UTP cable with a gauge of 23 and marked as 550MHz.  It’s a high-quality cable and I’ll add the link below.  Let’s talk about basic connectivity through my network.  My surface will be pinging, uploading and downloading files through the switch.  Here are the various lengths I tested.  I tested in both standard and vlan modes, and as expected, the speeds were the same.

• At 10m or 33ft, I am able to ping a computer on the network at <1ms.  I obtained an upload speed of 394.35 and a download speed of 544.59.  Not too bad
• At 50m or 164ft, similar results
• Same with 100m or 328ft
• At 150m (492ft) I still had a very strong connection even though I beyond the recommended maximum length
• To my surprise, so does 175m (574ft)
• I decided to keep going and 200m (656ft) did pretty good as well but obviously decreased
• At 229m (750ft), we are down within 10Mbps
• I tried several more lengths, all the way up to 305m (1000ft) and I was still able to make a connection.  I am very surprised

Now, let’s look at how well the switch preformed at these distances when connected to an IP camera which requires PoE.  I looked at the switches’ ability to power the camera, ping latency, bitrate, and any lag.  The camera is set to maximum resolution, frame rate and bitrate.

At 10m or 33ft, the camera powers on when plugged into the switch and I was able to ping the camera from my computer at 1ms.  The bitrate is quite high at 2036(16.29) kBps(Mbps) and the image quality is perfect.  The video isn’t perfect on this screen because the video card in the machine is quite old.  We are seeing a normal amount of lag of about 1 second.

• Results at 50m or 164ft were quite similar
• Same for 100m or 328ft
• Beyond this guaranteed stability length at 150m (492ft) and 175m (574ft) I was able to see footage from my IP camera with little to no lag.  Very impressive
• Once I hit 200m (656ft) and beyond, there was no data activity.  I tried a couple other lower megapixel cameras and same story.  The cameras powered up, right up to 1000ft, but no data link was visible