PoE switches designed for outdoor use in smart buildings and cities enable services ranging from public Wi-Fi and video surveillance to connected streetlights that increasingly need better reliability and cybersecurity protection.
Extending the industry’s family of PoE switches with the high industry-standard outdoor protection for these applications, Microchip Technology has announced its PDS-204GCO switch that adds increased cyber protection plus the redundancy required for high network availability in mission-critical applications with long-distance connectivity.
“Like our PDS-104GO switch, the PDS-204GCO complies with the high outdoor industry-standards, and is designed for easy and safe installation,” said Iris Shuker, director of Microchip's PoE business unit. “It also takes the next step to better support applications in which massive amounts of critical data are collected from widely dispersed PoE-powered edge IoT devices. It addresses these dual challenges of network security and network availability all the way from the endpoint to the central management system.”
PoE technology enables power to be delivered over standard Ethernet infrastructure for quick and easy installation of edge IoT end points. Outdoor PoE switches connect these devices to the network and power them under a broad range of environmental conditions while monitoring and controlling status, including remote reset. Microchip’s PDS-104GO switch is the first to support the industry’s high Ingress Protection 67 (IP67) waterproof rating in these applications while eliminating the need to open the unit during installation and jeopardize safety, performance or reliability. The PDS-204GCO switch takes the next step, adding cybersecurity features for Ethernet networks to protect applications against threats at all network levels, and redundancy features that enable high network availability.