When I first heard about Etherlighting™ (a few months ago), my reaction was, “Hmm… okay, but why?”

For decades, we’ve had the same two little LEDs on switch ports—amber and green, or sometimes just green and green. This has been the standard for as long as I can remember—and that’s going back quite a few years. So, why change it?

Let’s think about what we’ve had until now. One LED typically indicates link status, while the other shows port speed. For example, amber might signal 100 Mbps, and green would indicate 1 Gbps. Some switches would use only green for gigabit speeds, and show nothing for lower speeds. You get the idea—but every vendor implemented this slightly differently.

Essentially, those little LEDs showed just three states. They’d blink like crazy to show traffic. And that was fine. Functional—but boring.

Then someone came along and changed it.

I kept asking myself: Why? Why mess with this?

Then it hit me: Damn, I wish this switch had Etherlighting™.

Let me explain Etherlighting™ in my own terms:
Take those two little blinking lights and toss them. Replace them with an RGB LED. That single LED can now represent virtually any color. Let’s say violet for 100 Mbps, and red for 10 Gbps. Suddenly, link status becomes instantly useful and visible. Not only to show link speed, but even VLAN assignments, blue for VLAN 20, or Green for VLAN 40(you see where this is going).

So why did I want a switch with Etherlighting™? Simple. Imagine trying to find and remove a cable on a crowded switch. You squint at tiny port numbers and risk pulling the wrong one. With Etherlighting™, you can highlight the exact port. One command, and that single port lights up clearly. No guessing. No mistakes. Now picture that across five 48-port switches in a rack. Yeah, it makes a difference.

As of now, Etherlighting™ is unique to Ubiquiti. I believe (and hope) they’ll eventually roll it out across their entire switch lineup as models get refreshed.

Now, some might say, “But the cable boot blocks the LEDs anyway.” True—if you’re using those old snagless designs that haven’t evolved in decades. Ubiquiti’s patch cables, however, have frosted/clear jacks that allow the LEDs to shine through the connector—and honestly, it looks cool. TrueCable offers something similar too (personally, I like their black patch cables).

To me, this is the evolution of the switch port. Now, when I look at a switch, those LEDs mean something. They provide actual value. Sure, it might only save a few seconds here and there. But time is the one thing you can’t get back. And if Ubiquiti is trying to give me a little more of it, I’ll take it.

Makes me wonder—what else is Ubiquiti doing to save me time?