Creating a Better Network

We started the Firewalla project with the goal of creating a secure network. With the introduction of the Firewalla Gold and Purple, we want to help you create a better network. 

We believe a better network is a network that's secure and can be tuned for a better experience; ultimately a better network is a network you can control and manage traffic; here are the features that can make this possible.

• Smart Queue: Decongest your network, prioritize important traffic and reduce delay; making your video conference and phone calls smoother. (Supported on Blue Plus, Gold, Purple)
• Rules: Control what kind of traffic can or can not be on your network. (Supported on All platforms)
• Routes: Policy-based routing, easily manages where your traffic is routed to. (Supported on Blue Plus, Gold, Purple)

Smart Queue:

The core function of the Smart Queue is to help you to decongest your network, decrease buffer bloat, and allows everyone to have better zoom calls. This feature can be turned on with a single button, and if needed, you can further customize the policies behind it.

There are several things you can do with Smart Queue:

• Active Queue Management(AQM): reduce latency (buffer bloat) across all of your flows automatically. 
• Rate Limit: limit and shape any type of traffic, matching a category, application, or just IP/domain names.
• Prioritization: Mark any traffic (e.g. zoom or Webex) and make sure they are always ahead of the queue with the lowest delay.

Learn more about Smart Queue

Use Cases:

• Prioritize Zoom / WebEx traffic to ensure important discussions not getting disrupted.
• Use AQM and rate limit video traffic to reduce bandwidth usage.
• Reducing buffer bloat and delay.

Rules:

Rules can be used to access control traffic on your network and devices. The targets for the rules can be Applications, Categories (gaming, adult, video ...), Regions, or Network flows (IP, domain, port).

Benefits:

• Ability to schedule rules 
• Content-type filtering (gaming, adult, video ...)
• Application-based control
• Use predefined or self-defined target list for complex rules

Learn more about Rules

Use Cases:

• Manage kids or employees' network access by filtering applications, categories, or specific sites (or IP addresses)
• Block countries/regions off your network
• Schedule complex rules
• Manage who or what can talk to your network
• Quarantine new devices from accessing the internet

Routes:

In networking, network traffic is usually managed by the system's routing table;  This routing table can either be static, or dynamic, based on your network topology. Policy-based routing (PBR) is a technique used to make routing decisions based on policies set by you. 

The traditional Policy-based routing is based on the IP layer and the services the network is running. Firewalla Policy-based Routing is much more flexible, it can be mapped to the destination category (gaming, video). 

Benefits:

• Policy-based routing, route anything to anywhere.
• You can specify any type of traffic and route them to your VPN servers, as long as the VPN is connected. 
• If you have a dual-WAN setup, you can route any traffic to any WAN connection no matter the WANs are set to failover or load balancing. 

Learn more about Policy-based routing

Use Cases: 

• Routing all video traffic to a 3rd party VPN server 
• Routing all traffic on PC to the standby WAN
• Running Zoom or Gaming from a low latency WAN interface