Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "Who gives a network switch a two star review?". You're thinking "It has to pass packets to and from connected devices. It literally has one job, and that job isn't complicated. Either it does that one job, in which case there's nothing to stop it being five stars (Maybe four if the build quality isn't there), or it doesn't, in which case you return it and either assume it was an aberration, or if you're feeling vindictive write it a one star review". Allow me to introduce you to the GS208. At first blush this thing does exactly what it's supposed to do. You plug some devices in and they can communicate, and, with a suitable modem attached, get on the Internet. There's even a little power switch on the side, which is rare for a network switch. After all, it's a network switch, surely if it's plugged in then you want it to send packets. However, you'll be using that little power switch. Because this thing has to be rebooted periodically. You see, everything works as you'd expect, except every now and again one of two things can happen: 1) The throughput and latency start to increase and your 1gbps switch is reduced to 50mbps and lags or: 2) All the ports just stop working entirely. In either case, toggling that little power switch on and off is enough to get back up and running without putting wear on the power cord. As best as I can guess, there might be some slow memory leak in the firmware. That is of course, ridiculous, because we've had network switches as long as we've had Ethernet, which is some 35 years. The requirements and the code needed to implement those requirements are both well-understood. So there shouldn't be buggy firmware in a consumer product. There's no reason for it. But it seems NETGEAR have torn up the rulebook when building the GS208. So why not one star? Well, it does what it's supposed to for most of the time. Sure, I'd never want to run it in some production environment, and I'd never recommend anyone buy this thing when there are so many alternatives on the market. But, by and large it works, and you even start to forget that it has problems. Until they surface again. Possibly while you're traveling. And then you have to call someone while you're out of the country to go into your house and reboot your unreliable NETGEAR switch. Just to give a not-so-hypothetical scenario. And so we're at two stars. A product that works just well enough that I haven't bothered to return it, but that's just infuriating enough that I'm taking fifteen minutes out of my vacation to write a scathing review. Thanks, NETGEAR. Making network devices is literally in the name of your company, and yet you've somehow failed to make the simplest network device possible.