Firewalla, perhaps the only company that can say its hardware firewalls have something of an iconic status, today announced the latest addition to its portfolio: the $569 Firewalla Gold Plus. The Gold Plus has four 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and its deep packet inspection hardware can handle up to 5 Gigabits simultaneously.
With this addition, Firewalla now offers a full lineup, from the 100Mbit Red (which is probably too slow for most users right now) to the $329 Purple with up to a gigabit of inspection bandwidth — and a few other variants in between and now the Gold Plus at the top of the line. The regular Firewalla Gold will cost you $485 in the pre-purchase phase, but their inspection hardware can handle up to 3 gigabits of data.
The Gold Plus is something of a flagship for Firewalla, as it’s the most expensive and powerful of its combined firewall and router devices to date.
With its four 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports and 5 Gigabit inspection capabilities, it’s probably overkill for home users. The Purple – and maybe even the Blue Plus – would be more than suitable for most households. However, the Firewalla team also argues that a 2.5 gigabit firewall and 2.5 gigabit router could be a good investment for the future as home internet speeds increase to over 1 gigabits per second.
Photo credit: firewalla
However, I suspect most buyers here will be small businesses. For them, the Gold Plus may be just the right size for their needs (or the size they’ll soon grow to) before moving on to more expensive and more difficult-to-manage enterprise devices.
“When a router can’t match the speed of an Internet connection, users are leaving value and speed on the table,” said Jerry Chen, founder of Firewalla. “Firewalla Gold Plus is perfect for the fast internet of the future and helps to secure home networks and small businesses. We see many people upgrading their internet service and Firewalla Gold Plus can achieve those speeds, future-proof their network architecture and is compatible with WiFi 6E routers.”
When I tried Firewalla’s Purple router in the past, I was amazed at how easy it was to manage the basics of my home network without losing the ability to dive very deep into the settings and customize every aspect of the network. Part of that is why Firewalla has such a dedicated following, I think. It’s easy enough to get started, but doesn’t hold you back if you want to go beyond the basics. This is fun and useful for many home users, but often essential for businesses.
The new Firewalla Gold Plus is available for pre-order now (and its price will likely increase after the pre-order period). The devices will be delivered from January 2023. However, if the company reaches a certain number of pre-orders, it may bring that date forward.
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