Ubiquiti USW-Pro-Max-48

One of the most elegant switches I've ever seen. Highly recommend.

Like all ubiquity units I run at my site. Build quality and operational effectiveness is the highest.

As a professional network engineer, I’ve worked with a wide variety of switches, and the Ubiquiti 48-Port Pro Max POE Switch stands out for its impressive performance and feature set. The build quality is robust, with enterprise-grade components that deliver consistent power and data throughput. The 48 ports provide ample connectivity, and the POE functionality is rock-solid—delivering reliable power to all connected devices without any issues. The switch supports advanced features like VLAN tagging, LAG (Link Aggregation), and has a solid SNMP implementation for remote monitoring, which is a must-have for larger environments. I was particularly impressed with the overall performance under heavy traffic, with minimal latency and excellent throughput. Ubiquiti’s UniFi Controller software makes managing the switch a breeze, even in larger deployments, and the ability to configure everything from VLANs to port mirroring from a single interface is a huge time-saver. For anyone managing a large network, this switch is a game-changer. It offers a perfect balance of cost, reliability, and performance. Highly recommended for professional setups!

Overall, this switch is okay, but does have a substantial limitation when compared to competitors. I'll start with the good things. - In the box, Ubiquiti includes all of the necessary hardware to mount the device in a rack. What I mean by everything is the brackets and screws for the brackets (it's surprising, but some vendors do not include brackets), the screws to secure the brackets to the rack, and the clamp-nuts that go in the rack blanks. - It's really nice packaging. Very Apple-like from my perspective. - It's truly plug and play if using it with a Unifi gateway device. - It works with other non-Ubiquiti switches. One cannot manage the other devices through the Ubiquiti software, but that isn't a realistic expectation. I don't know why it wouldn't work with other non-Ubiquity switches but though empirically stating that has demonstrated it does might help others. - It has good performance port to port and port to gateway. - The ports have an option of setting the illumination color based on the speed negotiated with the device. That's a nice touch. It might seem like eye candy, but I've had issues with one of my Synology NAS devices that likes to reconnect at 100Mb/s on a 1G interface. - I don't know that everyone would see this as a positive, but I did. The unit seems to have a lower threshold when evaluating the quality of a physical connection. I have a single-mode fiber connection between this switch and another switch. The Unifi switch noted that the speed was not ideal. I swapped out the SFP on the other device and everything was golden. I swapped back to the original and, again, saw the speed warning. The prior switch didn't indicate a problem, and showed about a 15% slower speed test result. There is only one thing that knocks my rating from 5 to three...and I almost gave it a two. Ubiquiti's implementation of Layer 3 support on this switch is half-baked. Literally. It does not support dual-stack IP if used as a Layer 3 switch. (This review is as of 2025.11.20) In other words, if there is any expectation that IPv6 will work with this switch in a Layer 3 mode--lose the expectation. Though it is possible to disable Layer-3 functionality on the switch (thus pushing all traffic to the gateway instead of intra-switch routing), what is the point of purchasing a layer-3 switch if it's not leveraged as a layer-3 switch? The competition has offered dual-stack support for years...literally years. The lack of this on this switch is just not acceptable. If there is no need for IPv6 support when expecting the switch to operate in a layer-3 mode, I'd say this switch is a really good value and appears to be a high quality alternative. Likewise, if there is no need for IPv6 in the target environment this switch is a good buy. But, if IPv6 is leveraged in the target environment and there is an expectation that the routing burden would move from the gateway to the switch, it's best to look elsewhere.