&lt;b&gt;Control and Configure Beyond Plug-N-Play Connectivity&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Todays growing businesses demand and rely more on their network to carry out mission-critical business activities. Companies are putting more network traffic and applications such as VoIP phones and IP cameras on their Ethernet infrastructure. It needs the network intelligence to separate the voice and video traffic from data and prioritize them accordingly. However companies do not necessarily have more money or advanced training to deal with complex managed switches. NETGEAR Smart Managed Plus Switches meet this growing need by providing fundamental network features that will help optimize the performance of business networks. On top of the plug-N-play Gigabit Ethernet connectivity these switches also offer essential networking features such as VLAN QoS IGMP Snooping Link Aggregation / Port Trunking on models with 16 ports or more rate limiting and traffic monitoring. NETGEAR Smart Managed Plus Switches are an exceptional value for businesses looking to add intelligence to their network beyond what unmanaged switches can provide.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Prioritize Voice/Video&lt;br /&gt;With the ability to set up and configure QoS these Gigabit Smart Managed Plus Switches can detect different types of network traffic and assign the desired priority to latency-sensitive traffic such as voice and video. This helps improve the delivery quality of related applications such as VoIP multimedia broadcasting and video conferencing.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;b&gt;Build Multiple Network Groups&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br /&gt;These Gigabit Smart Managed Plus Switches can help divide big networks into smaller more manageable groups and have resources dedicated for one or several groups rather than making the same resources open to all. This feature improves overall network performance adds security to network traffic and makes more efficient use of network resources.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;b&gt;Troubleshoot Cable Problems&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br /&gt;All Gigabit Smart Managed Plus Switches come with a cable diagnostic feature that enables users to easily find out the health status of their network cables. If there are any problems this feature helps quickly locate the point where the cabling fails; allowing connectivity issues to be fixed much faster potentially saving technicians hours of troubleshooting.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;b&gt;IGMP Snooping for Optimized Multimedia Traffic Delivery&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br /&gt;By listening in on the IGMP conversation between hosts and routers the Gigabit Smart Managed Plus switch can maintain a map as to which links need which IP multicast streams. The Gigabit Web Managed (Plus) therefore will be able to forward multicast traffic only to the links that have asked for them and cut multicast traffic from links that do not contain a multicast listener. Essentially IGMP snooping helps optimize multicast performance at Layer 2 and is especially useful for bandwidth-intensive IP multicast applications such as IPTV.