Netgear Launches Sub-$500 Gigabit Firewall

can the quad wan take four dsl connections and give the full throughput of all four combined, cause if that is the case, it will be cheaper and more reiable for me to buy 4 dsl lines and dump my t1

Only $300 less and I can finally put network security off on the network level and stop using desktop firewall/av software.

Actually been eying Netgear's small Firewalls for quite some time too bad most of them cut out at around 60MBits/s hopefully there will be more capable products like this one coming out soon.

50 dollars router is good enough for me already. home user. or maybe double router plus AVG free antivirus software. tri- protection.

I wonder how it's configured. The reason I spend money on Cisco at this price range at work is because of its quality IOS abilities.

I am intrigued to see a full Gbps wan to lan connection, that's usually found in much higher end firewalls.

I'm just barely learning all this in school right now, and I gotta say.. that router sounds sexy.

Well, I'm on the way to getting my CCNA, so I will have to say Cisco.

After them, the HP ProCurve series is really good stuff too.

For the home, I'll have to go with Linksys (Cisco, d'oh!)

And to think my FVS336G was super-awesome... sigh... Same with my Phenom II 965...

Its not going to be able to *BOND* the 4 connections, however it will be able to balance them. Which if you live anywhere remotely close to a CO would mean 4*6Mbit AVAILABLE bandwidth for use. Which means any ONE connection can use 6mbit.. Torrenting would be helped but thats about it.
As far as netgear goes I've never been a fan of their stuff even in the home sector, and from what I've seen of their business class switches they are not in the same league as cisco and HP for Layer 3 + switches. Their dedicated VPN firewalls have done decent for IPSEC between offices at a rate of around 8mbit, but beyond that I think netgear stinks.

sorry, it doesn't work that way. Imagine having four mailboxes. While you could easily send info down with either address, the respondent will only reply to the sender address. A single line could get flooded, and all resemblance of additive speed is gone. The router won't learn A prints his tweets while B sends back novels. (Issue 1) Now, if you were to have a conversation with someone (visit a website), you wouldn't want to randomly switch over to using a different mailbox all the time. The responder has no way to know that you are, in fact, a mashup of four seemingly separate people. Simply, you would only be able to stream a video at one of the line's speed. (Issue 2) But, if you had a family of four individuals who all used the internet roughly identically, you could assign each his/her own line. Finally, the router does not have a means of splitting like traffic. All the load balancing is rule based, restricted to things like MAC, ethernet port, IP address range, or traffic type. I load balance with my fvs336g and it works great, but its just a way for me to somewhat lazily split up my bittorrent traffic with everything else.

+1 kennyforgames

Simple LinkSys or Trendnet router with AVG works fine for me. No problems using that setup on all our computers.

At best you'd have the speed of one line per tcp connection - that is you can't download or upload any faster than a single dsl - but using torrents or webserver systems etc you can get more speed this way. But because the 4 dsl lines have different ip numbers you'd either need dns entries for your services with serveral numbers available, or virtual ip or similar at your isp - which'll bring up costs more than your t1 I'm sure.

In any event, I don't think this device is meant for that kind of operation. But there's noone stopping you from setting up a windows 2008r2 or some linux with 4 lan adapters and load distribution. Except the cost of such systems running and the windows license (any students have access to licenses for free btw)

I like the Netgear ProSafe line for unmanaged switches.
It's not so much the best out there, but rather offers similar performance/reliability at a lower price point.
Crossbar based switches are nicer than TDM/FDM based switches, but cost ineffective in most cases. An exception would be high traffic backbones that usually house managed switches.

I've had good luck with Cisco, 3COM, and HP for managed switches.
Preference depends on usage.

For home use, a linksys router with third party firmware (OpenWRT, Tomato, DD-WRT, ect.) work exceptionally well. I prefer Cisco routers of varying grades for businesses of any size.

The most effective standalone firewall solutions I've personally seen in action are from SonicWall.

cisco's way overpriced though. with hp u get the same performance and better reliability for a lower price. You get fewer features, but everything u need is still included.

What you guys are commenting about load balancing? For P2P you are forced to use a single line due to protocol restrictions although some clients might be able to get packets from two or more IPs on 2-4 lines, but when using HTTP traffic on a website packets are load-balanced between the available lines coming from multiple IPs practically. That is what the load-balancing feature is all about. Otherwise it would be pretty useless if the lines wouldn't be merged together for pratical use by LAN users.