I own a VOIP provider and am looking for a firewall/router for smaller customers of less than 15 seats. I cannot find the throughput numbers for the Surf SOHO device. Does anyone know what they are? Many of these customers have cable modems at 25 - 100 Mb/s and I don’t want to get in their way. I’m just looking for the Ethernet WAN numbers. In most cases, I won’t use the wifi part of the device.
Also, 15 seats means 15 computers and 15 phones (30 devices). Is that ok?
If it looks like they might be on the edge at 15, I assume I could go with a Balance-20.
The Surf SOHO has a max router throughput of 100 Mbps, but 30 devices may be pushing it. It is designed for residential applications.
Also, it only has one Ethernet WAN port. If you are looking to fail over to a second Ethernet WAN connection you would want to look at the Balance 20 or higher.
Sounds good. If the customer is at 20-30 devices, and had any any chance of growth, I’d probably do the Balance 20 anyway. Only if they think they’ll have no growth for at least 3 years would I do a SOHO for 20-30 devices.
The recommended users for the Balance 20/30 and SOHO is about 25 users simultaneously with a maximum of 100Mbps of throughput. I wouldn’t recommend the SOHO here if you are not concerned about the WiFi part. In addition the SOHO is a fail-over only device, meaning that it can only use one connection at a time. The other connections would be there in case the primary connection went down it would fail-over to the next connection. The Balance router does give you a few more options as you can have and use multiple connections and send data through both connections (load balancing).
For this you may be able to get by with a Balance 20/30 but I would definitely recommend either the Balance 210/310 or Balance 305. As in the scenario you described they would not have to worry about growth as the B210 on up would be able to accommodate their needs for years to come. Let us know if you have any questions at all regarding this.