Router with 1gbps+ throughput and good security?

[pcnubber]

I started with a NightHawk R7000 and upgraded to a Meraki MX65W. Which the Nighthawk would see 1gbps on client machines but it's security is weak and not very feature rich. The Meraki on the other-hand has excellent security features but extremely slow (200mbps) for a $1200 appliance.

Is there anything that's like the Meraki that has higher throughput that's not outrageously expensive?

Lastly, is there more flexibility to using a non-wireless router and a separate AP instead of combining them into one device?

 

[bill001g]

Part of the issue is you can not compare devices like that....you can but the consumer boxes never have any numbers. They just give the best and fastest number they can get with all options turned off.

As I am sure you have seen the cisco box gives you worst case performance number for various uses of the device. A device you are doing VPN is very different than one that you are running stateful traffic filters on.

If you were to load similar feature onto consumer routers they too would not run as fast.

Not sure what to suggest. All reputable firewall manufactures have charts like this. You will quickly find that all appear to perform like crap compared to consumer routers. Again this is because they are actually testing worst case senerios rather than best case. You will see many that actually show the difference between though puts with maximum size packets and with minimum size packets.

You can try loading third party firmware to the nighthawk if it accepts it. You can also look at using a general purpose computer with a linux based firewall. There are a number of free ones like pfsense. Pretty much all you need is cpu and memory to get performance.

You need to very carefully figure out what feature is most important to you and determine how much firewall you need. It takes nothing to say filter IP it takes a lot more for the firewall to detect say SIP traffic and dynamically allow the actual voice session though.

 

[pcnubber]

Thanks for the reply bill!

I did shut off all packet inspection to test with and 250 is the max the device can handle. I verified thus with Cisco support. I also tested with a single PC connected to verify no one else was leeching bandwidth.

I would like some monitoring and a solid firewall. I want more fine grain control than just setting up port forwarding.

I would also prefer to keep it an appliance rather than another PC in the house.

 

[Scottray]

Some more info would be helpful. How many pc's are hardwired to the network, how many on wifi? What ISP do you use and how much bandwidth are you paying for? What levels are of security are you looking for and why?

 

[pcnubber]

Some more info would be helpful. How many pc's are hardwired to the network, how many on wifi? What ISP do you use and how much bandwidth are you paying for? What levels are of security are you looking for and why?

Sure thing. About 8 wired, and 8 wireless clients on average. 1Gbps fiber ISP connection. Stateful firewall, IDS and detailed monitoring.