Firewalla offers a pretty straightforward guide to doing so, and no matter which route you go, it shouldn’t take more than five minutes to get everything up and running. Then, our engineers just go ‘I want to play with this.’ And they got another channel out from the same Wi-Fi chip.”ĭepending on your network configuration, you can either connect the USB C-powered device in line between your modem and router or simply connect it to your router like any other ethernet-wired device. One nifty feature of the Purple is that it features built-in Wi-Fi, so it can function as a travel router, but in a nifty twist, you can also tether it to your phone and provide internet connectivity to your network when your regular internet connection is down.Īs Firewalla co-founder and CEO Jerry Chen told me, this Wi-Fi feature was originally something the company’s engineers wanted to play with - and I think that’s a good example of how Firewalla as a whole thinks about building its devices. To make that a bit easier, you can manage devices separately or group them in ways that make sense for your network and usage (I have groups for all of my desktops and IoT devices, for example). But it also can function as a VPN server and client and, if you want granular control over everything in your network, the Firewalla app allows you to go very deep into managing and shaping your network and traffic. In addition to monitoring and controlling your internet usage, the Purple also includes the ability to filter ads and provide parental controls to block access to adult content, for example, or to take the Xbox offline after a specific time. Like its other devices, the Purple’s core function is as a firewall, but with a device watching over your network, you can obviously do a lot more.

Home firewall