TP-LINK LiteWave LS105G - Switch - unmanaged

After several weeks of running the TP-LINK LiteWave LS105G - Switch - unmanaged through its paces in a real home network setup, I can tell you straight: this is one of those rare budget purchases that doesn't make you regret saving money. I've tested enough networking gear to know that cheap switches often come with hidden costs , whether that's unreliable throughput, a plasticky build that cracks under desk pressure, or heat management so poor the thing throttles itself within a month. So when something at this price point actually holds up, it's worth saying so clearly.

The LS105G is a five-port Gigabit unmanaged switch. No app, no configuration, no login page , you plug it in and it works. That simplicity is either exactly what you need or completely wrong for your situation, and I'll help you figure out which. Over the testing period I ran it as a desk-side expansion switch, a media room hub, and briefly as a secondary switch off a main router. It handled all three without complaint. But there are caveats, and I'll get into those properly.

With nearly 17,000 Amazon reviews sitting at 4.7 out of 5, the crowd has already spoken fairly loudly. But crowd wisdom and individual fit aren't always the same thing. Here's what I actually found after putting it through consistent real-world use.

Switching capacity sits at 10 Gbps with a forwarding rate of 7.44 Mpps. For a five-port switch at this price, those numbers are entirely appropriate , you're not going to saturate it with typical home or small office traffic. The MAC address table holds 2,000 entries, which is more than enough for any realistic home deployment. It supports IEEE 802.3, 802.3u, and 802.3ab standards, meaning it plays nicely with virtually any modern networking equipment you're likely to throw at it.

Power consumption is rated at a maximum of 3.6W, which is genuinely low. Running it 24/7 for a year costs you next to nothing in electricity , we're talking pennies rather than pounds. The unit measures 98 x 98 x 25mm and weighs around 200g, so it's genuinely compact. TP-Link rates it for operating temperatures between 0°C and 40°C, which covers any reasonable indoor environment in the UK. One thing worth noting: the power adapter is included in the box, which isn't always a given at this price tier.

Auto-negotiation and auto MDI/MDIX are both present. Auto-negotiation means the switch automatically detects the speed of whatever you plug in and adjusts accordingly , so if you've got an older device that only does 100 Mbps, it'll connect at 100 Mbps without you having to configure anything. Auto MDI/MDIX means you don't need to worry about crossover cables versus straight-through cables. You just plug in whatever cable you have and it works. These are table-stakes features in 2026, but they're worth calling out because they genuinely reduce friction.

The fanless design is more significant than it might seem. A lot of cheap switches include a tiny fan that runs constantly and produces an irritating high-pitched whine. The LS105G uses passive cooling only, which means it runs completely silently. For a desk setup or a living room media cabinet, that matters. I had it sitting about 30cm from where I work for several weeks and never once noticed it acoustically. The unit does get slightly warm to the touch under sustained load, but nothing alarming , it's well within normal operating parameters for passive-cooled hardware.

Wall-mount capability is a nice practical touch. The underside has two keyhole slots that accept standard screws, so if you want to tuck it behind a TV or mount it in a comms cupboard, you can do that without any additional hardware. It's a small thing, but it shows TP-Link thought about real-world installation rather than just bench performance.

In all three scenarios, throughput was exactly what you'd expect from a Gigabit switch: full 1 Gbps between connected devices when the hardware on either end supported it. I ran iPerf3 tests between a desktop and a NAS connected through the switch and consistently hit 940+ Mbps , that's essentially line rate, with the small overhead being normal TCP/IP behaviour rather than any switch limitation. File transfers between the NAS and desktop were fast and stable, with no unexplained drops or speed fluctuations over extended sessions. I deliberately ran a large 50GB transfer overnight and came back to find it completed cleanly with no errors.

Latency is essentially negligible for an unmanaged switch of this type , we're talking sub-millisecond switching latency, which is what store-and-forward architecture at this scale delivers. For gaming, streaming, and general home use, this is completely irrelevant in practice. The switch doesn't introduce any meaningful delay. I ran some online gaming sessions through it (connected console to switch to router) and experienced no issues that could be attributed to the switch itself. Heat management under sustained load is fine , the unit gets warm but not hot, and I saw no evidence of thermal throttling or instability even after running it continuously for several weeks.

One thing I want to be clear about: this is an unmanaged switch. There's no QoS, no VLAN support, no traffic prioritisation. If you're running a home lab and need any of those features, this isn't your device. But for straightforward port expansion in a home or small office environment, the raw performance is genuinely solid. It does one thing , switch Gigabit Ethernet traffic , and it does it well.

The RJ45 ports themselves are the more important quality indicator, and here the LS105G holds up well. The port housings feel secure, cables click in with a satisfying snap, and the locking tabs engage properly. After several weeks of plugging and unplugging cables during testing, none of the ports showed any signs of loosening or degradation. The LED indicators , one per port for link/activity, plus a power LED , are clearly visible without being obnoxiously bright. They're useful at a glance without lighting up your room at night.

The rubber feet on the underside are adequate. Four small pads that grip a desk surface reasonably well. They're not going to win any engineering prizes, but they do the job and haven't peeled off during testing. The power connector on the rear is a standard barrel jack that fits snugly , no wobble, no intermittent connection issues. The included power adapter is compact and unobtrusive. Overall, the build quality is appropriate for the price tier. It's not built like a Netgear ProSAFE rack unit, but it's not supposed to be. For a device that sits on a desk or in a cabinet and does nothing but pass network traffic, the construction is more than adequate.

One minor gripe: the unit is quite light, which means it can slide around on a desk if cables are pulling on it from different directions. It's not a serious problem, but if you're running cables in multiple directions from a desk-mounted position, you might want to use the wall-mount option or use a cable tie to keep things tidy. Personally, I'd rather have the wall-mount option than a heavier unit , it gives you more flexibility in placement.

The LED indicators make it immediately obvious whether everything is working. Power LED on, port LEDs lit for connected devices, activity LEDs blinking when traffic is flowing. If a port LED isn't on, your cable isn't connected properly or your device isn't powered. That's the entire troubleshooting guide. I genuinely cannot think of a simpler networking device to operate. My parents could set this up without calling me, which is a higher bar than it sounds.

Day-to-day operation is equally friction-free. The switch just runs. It doesn't need rebooting, it doesn't drop connections, it doesn't require any maintenance. Over several weeks of continuous operation I never once had to touch it after the initial setup. That's exactly what you want from infrastructure hardware , it should be invisible. The only time you should think about your switch is when you're adding a new device to it. The LS105G achieves that invisibility without any drama.

The wall-mount option is worth mentioning again from a usability perspective. The keyhole slots are well-positioned and the unit hangs flat against a wall without any tilt or wobble once mounted. If you're doing a clean cable installation behind a TV or in a comms cupboard, this makes a real difference to the finished result. It's a small design decision that shows someone at TP-Link was thinking about how people actually use these things rather than just how they look in a product photo.

Compatibility is essentially universal. Any device with an RJ45 Ethernet port will work with this switch , Windows PCs, Macs, Linux machines, NAS devices, games consoles, smart TVs, streaming boxes, IP cameras, VoIP phones, printers, you name it. The auto-negotiation handles speed matching automatically, so older 10/100 devices coexist happily alongside Gigabit devices on the same switch without any configuration. I connected a mix of devices during testing including a Windows 11 desktop, a Synology NAS, a PlayStation 5, a Raspberry Pi, and an older laptop that only does 100 Mbps , all worked simultaneously without any issues.

Daisy-chaining works fine. I connected the LS105G to a port on a larger managed switch and it behaved exactly as expected , the managed switch saw it as a single connected device, and the devices plugged into the LS105G were accessible on the network normally. There's no spanning tree protocol configuration to worry about in a simple home setup, though if you're building a more complex network with multiple switches and potential loops, you'll want to be aware that unmanaged switches handle STP automatically but you have less control over the behaviour. For a straightforward home network, this is a non-issue.

One thing to be aware of: there's no uplink port designation. Any port can be used as the uplink to your router, which is convenient. Just plug your router into any of the five ports and the remaining four become your expansion ports. The switch handles this automatically via auto MDI/MDIX.

Media room setups are another strong fit. Modern living rooms often have a TV, a games console, a streaming device, and maybe a smart home hub all wanting wired connections. Running four separate Ethernet cables back to the router is impractical in most homes, but running one cable to a switch and then short patch cables to each device is entirely manageable. The fanless design is particularly valuable here , you don't want a whirring fan in your living room. I ran this configuration for several weeks and it worked flawlessly, with the PS5 and TV both getting full Gigabit connections.

Small business or home office environments with a handful of wired devices are also well served. A small office with a few desktops, a shared printer, and a NAS doesn't need a managed switch with VLANs and QoS , it needs reliable Gigabit connectivity at a sensible price. The LS105G delivers that. The three-year warranty from TP-Link is reassuring in a business context, even if the price is so low that replacement is barely a consideration.

Where it doesn't fit: any scenario requiring PoE for cameras or access points, any setup needing VLANs for network segmentation, home labs running 2.5G or 10G equipment, or environments where you need more than five ports. For those situations, you need to step up to a managed switch or a PoE-capable unit. The LS105G knows what it is and doesn't pretend to be anything else.

To put it in context: a managed five-port Gigabit switch from a reputable brand typically costs two to three times more. You get VLAN support, QoS, and a web interface in return. If you need those features, that premium is justified. If you don't , and most home users genuinely don't , you're paying for capability you'll never use. The LS105G strips all of that away and gives you the core functionality at a fraction of the cost.

The 4.7-star rating across nearly 17,000 reviews is a meaningful data point here. That's not a small sample size that could be skewed by a handful of enthusiastic early adopters , that's a genuinely large pool of real-world users who've bought this switch, used it, and reported back. The consistency of positive feedback across such a large sample suggests this isn't a product that works brilliantly for some people and terribly for others. It's a product that does what it says, reliably, for most people who buy it. That's actually harder to achieve than it sounds in the budget networking space, where quality control can be inconsistent.

If you're on the fence about whether to spend a bit more for a managed switch, my honest advice is: think carefully about whether you'll actually use the management features. Most people who buy managed switches for home use never log into the web interface after initial setup. If that sounds like you, save the money and get the LS105G.

In terms of raw performance, all three switches deliver essentially identical results , they're all unmanaged Gigabit switches with similar switching capacities, and at this level of networking hardware, the performance differences between them are negligible in real-world use. The differentiation comes down to build quality, form factor, warranty, and price. The Netgear GS305 has a slightly more premium feel to the enclosure and comes in a metal chassis option (the GS305E, though that's managed). The D-Link is similarly plasticky to the TP-Link but has a slightly larger footprint.

Where the LS105G wins is on the combination of price, warranty length, and the wall-mount option. TP-Link's three-year warranty is competitive, and the compact square form factor with wall-mount capability gives it a practical edge for clean installations. The Netgear GS305 has a slightly better brand reputation in some circles, but honestly, for an unmanaged switch at this price, brand prestige matters a lot less than it does for more complex networking gear. The LS105G holds its own comfortably.

The fanless design, compact form factor, wall-mount capability, and three-year warranty all add practical value beyond the basic spec sheet. The 4.7-star rating from nearly 17,000 buyers isn't a fluke , it reflects a product that consistently delivers on its promises. Trusted by that many buyers, and with my own testing confirming the positive consensus, this is a straightforward recommendation for anyone who needs simple Gigabit port expansion.

Who should buy this? Anyone who needs to expand a single Ethernet port into five, wants fanless silent operation, and doesn't need management features like VLANs or QoS. Home office users, media room setups, small businesses with basic wired networking needs , all strong fits. Who should skip it? Anyone needing PoE for cameras or access points, more than five ports, management features for network segmentation, or 2.5G/10G speeds for high-performance home lab work. For those use cases, you need to spend more and get a different class of switch entirely.

My editorial score: 8.5 out of 10. The half-point deduction is really just acknowledging that it's a no-frills product with no room for growth , if your needs change and you need management features, you'll be buying a new switch. But within its defined scope, it's close to the best you can get at this price. For what it is, it's excellent.