Episode 63 — PoE Design: budgeting power and avoiding late-stage surprises
Power over Ethernet is included in CloudNetX campus design objectives because it links network design to physical power constraints and can create widespread outages if capacity is miscalculated. This episode defines PoE as delivering electrical power along the same cabling that carries data, commonly powering wireless access points, IP phones, cameras, and other edge devices. The first paragraph focuses on PoE budgeting as shared-capacity planning: a switch has a total power budget that must be divided across ports, device classes draw different power levels, and peak draw matters more than average draw for resilience planning. It also explains how PoE choices affect availability, because powering critical access devices through a centralized switch means the switch’s UPS protection, power feed redundancy, and monitoring become part of the endpoint’s reliability.
