In an era of taking your reusable shopping bags to Whole Foods and forgoing plastic water bottles for aluminum, consumers are constantly trying to find a way to “go green.” Of course, we often relegate these thoughts by the wayside in our offices of quad-core Xeon rigs with dual 30-inch cinema displays, but you can always start small, and the green Ethernet Switches from D-Link are a low cost, no-effort way to start.
An Ethernet switch is a simple solution to adding more devices”"be they computers, Xbox, or TiVo”"to a network internet connection. Set-up is simple: connect any port on the device to the network and then connect the switch and the device via an Ethernet cord. You’re all set”"no software input required. Connecting your computers via a switch not only shares your internet connection between devices, it also allows for ultra-fast transfers between networked computers, allowing gigabit speed transfers of large files.
Energy savings come from the devices’ ability to intelligently sense not only which ports have devices plugged in, but also their power state and the length of Ethernet cord connecting the switch and device. If the computer is off, the switch ramps power down to that port. Shorter Ethernet cords require less power, and the switch adjusts accordingly. D-Link even designed the packaging for the DGS-2205 to be eco-friendly, and the device is Energy Star compliant.
The router comes with a plethora of other features, including the ability to work with all existing 10, 100, or 1000 Mbps Ethernet devices as well as traffic sensing mechanisms that eliminate congestion to keep LAN games lag free and VoIP calls jitter-free.
D-Link currently offers four switches with these green features. The DGS-2205 and -2208 are aimed at home and small office users with the ability to connect 4 and 7 devices, respectively. The DGS-1016D and -1024D, which connect 15 and 23 devices, can be rack mounted. While only the DGS-2205 is available now, the other switches will be updated with the green features later this year.
Remember that if you connect to the internet via a cable or DSL modem, you’ll need a router that can assign multiple IP address to your devices; an Ethernet switch shares one IP address between your devices. Also, if you tend just to just put your computer to sleep instead of shutting it down, D-Link admits that you won’t see significant power savings.
Even still, the D-Link router series is an affordable, low-effort way to cut power costs and energy use. And since you’ll feel less guilt, maybe you can splurge for a bigger, brighter display too.
Nice review of the device. The last sentence seems kind of odd, though. If the whole point is to save energy, buying a bigger brighter (and assumably more power hungry) display would defeat the purpose.