Awareness | M4300-52G Netgear switch limitation

Learn about the limitations of the M4300-52G Netgear Switch.

Updated at January 9th, 2024

Information


A transmitter on one half of the switch sending to a receiver on the other half will drop PTPv2 packet.

There is a limitation to Netgear 48 port gigabit M4300 switches. This limitation is particular to the M4300-52G. An issue exists related to the board layout. This model uses a twin chipset, essentially two 24 port switches each with its own 2x10G uplinks sharing a high bandwidth connection in the backplane.

Any PTPv2 required endpoints sending traffic across this backplane bridge would be missing time added to the packet. A transmitter on one half of the switch sending to a receiver on the other half will drop PTPv2 packets due to this backplane bridge, the packets will be incorrectly synced with the clock leader in the network.

There is a high-speed PCIe lane that goes between the two ASICs that will work for video, and standard IGMP MC, TCP traffic types. However, anything time-sensitive will not pass successfully between the two Asics across this high-speed PCIe lane.