Olli

Sorry to hear you had a bad experience with our Datagate, there are a couple of things I'd like to clear up, so hopefully people using our gear will have everything working as they want it to.

There were issues with old versions of the firmware and multiple (> 12) arnet universe broadcast. The fact is that when we designed it, it never came to mind people would want to broadcast artnet in such large quantity, we thought unicast would be the norm.

Since V2.0 we greatly improved this and even perfomed a packet loss/latency shoot out at one of the large production houses here in Australia where we compared the Datagate against other devices, some of which where mentioned above.
In the end the Datagate outperformed all of them, packet loss was minimal and timing on all the 8 ports was identical, all other devices had delays between the various ports.
This is up to around 35 to 40 universes, which is the limit for a 10B T network.

In a broader sense though broadcasting that much data just isn't good practice you load up all the devices on your network and even if you have 100bT it just pushes the limit a bit further but the limit is still there. Unicast and a properly design network should be used for large install as you have NO limit to the number of nodes universes.

We have helped users with large video displays installations using datagates, every time it worked perfectly when they used unicast and syncronised the datagate dmx port refresh rates with the refresh of the sending software.

As these projects/gigs get more and more complex it becomes less plug and play and requires some network engineering. We are always happy to help our users and share our expertise to make things work for them

Don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions

Thanks

Nicolas Moreau
www.enttec.com