My D-Link 604 is starting to act up so need a new wired router soon. Which one has a decent firewall, does not lag your internet connection much and is not too expensive? Must be Xbox 360 compatible too. Thanks.

That's a good question. I recently bought the very affordable Netgear WGR614. It offers SPI (stateful packet inspection), an option to disable response to "ping" from the internet, and the ability to turn off the wireless radio when not needed. That's better then I was using previously, but it's probably still pretty lightweight. What is your budget?

Which home user router has a decent firewall inside it?

Dec 07, 2007 21 Replies

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John Adams 18 years ago

OK, and that is why you should run hardware router firewall and software firewall too? I'm not on a LAN anyway. This is just for home use. I share files between computers by using a USB thumbdrive.

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Todd H. 18 years ago

The traditional answer to that is that a "software firewall" generally has egress filtering and can alert you to specific programs trying to get out to the internet, whereas a hardware device can't give you such clues.

If the primary concern is blocking unsolicited traffic from the internet, a sane SPI home gateway device should do fine.

The hardware device is generally a more robust solution because the "personal firewall" software runs on top of windows... and we know that windows is fairly complex and no infallable to say the least.

Just like network based and host based intrusion detection products offer complementary protection, so do hardware and software "firewall" solutions.

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