- Virtual CIO
IT Governance for Small Businesses: A Practical Guide
11 Mar, 2026




£94.37 inc. VAT
AI-generated summary
The Zyxel GS1900-24E is one of those “boring but useful” 24-port managed switches that makes sense when you need something more reliable than an office plastic-throwaway, but you don’t want to pay for features you’ll never touch. At ~£78.76 ex-VAT, it’s strong value for straightforward L2 management: VLANs, basic traffic control, and sane switching behaviour for typical small/medium office setups, workshop networks, or a lightly segmented environment where you want control without complexity. If you’re replacing an unmanaged switch and you care about keeping things like VoIP, guest/IT networks, and printer/IoT traffic from getting too friendly, this is the kind of switch that quietly does the job.
That said, I wouldn’t pick it if you’re planning heavy inter-VLAN routing, lots of advanced security policies, or higher-end redundancy features—this is very much a “managed L2 workhorse”, not the core of a demanding network. Also, if your network already runs on newer stackable gear with more headroom for growth, you might end up outgrowing it sooner than you’d like. Overall: buy it if you want dependable, budget-friendly managed switching in a 1U rack without getting sucked into feature bloat. Pass if you know you’ll need more advanced routing, aggressive security tooling, or future-proofing for a bigger core.

TP-Link
TP-Link JetStream TL-SG3210XHP-M2 V2 - Switch - Managed - 8 x 10/100/1000/2.5G + 2 x 10 Gigabit SFP+ - rack-mountable - PoE+ (240 W)

D-Link
D-Link DGS 1100-05V2 - Switch - smart - 5 x 10/100/1000 - desktop - AC 100/240 V

Netgear
NETGEAR GS108X - Switch - unmanaged - 8 x 10/100/1000 + 1 x 10Gb Ethernet SFP+ (uplink) - desktop, wall-mountable

TP-Link
TP-Link Omada SG3452XMPP V1.8 - Switch - L2+ - Managed - 40 x 10/100/1000 (PoE+) + 8 x 10/100/1000 (PoE++) + 4 x 10Gb Ethernet SFP+ - rack-mountable - PoE++ (750 W)