1

Hey I recently went to a small office with around 8 people. They had around 10 Voip phones and 8 computers.

There router seemed to be water damaged and stopped working (it was an old Netgear home router),I replaced it with an Linksys E2500 (Also a Home router)

For the past week,everything seems to be working fine. I recently spoke to someone and they told me that placing a consumer router in this type of business, is risky and un-professional.

Will the office have issues with this type of router ? Will I be getting a call soon that something is not working lol ?

They really don’t need any extra features like VPN ,Vlans etc.

7 Spice ups
2

There is no risk at all as far as you have proof of the purchase .

3

Home routers usually have fewer management features and lower throughput. While I am not a proponent of the more recent Belkin based Linksys, and would never buy it under any circumstances, you need to ensure you have the latest firmware and to be aware of the outstanding issues (if any are published by Belkin). And yes, I would recommend Cisco Small Business for anything like this, and home use as well.

4

Having a commercial grade router at home is not an issue unless you enable advance features which may not be a " common" scenario for a home

1 Spice up
5

Give PfSense a look?

A consumer router could be ok for such a small office- depending on what they need it to do. No VPNs or outside services running thru the firewall? Then it’s probably ok. IMO, home routers can be almost as secure as professional- as long as they’re locked down. Have a strong password, secure wifi, and UPnP & WPS disabled.

If they’re doing anything more advanced than basic Internet connectivity with it, I’d start getting squeamish.

@pfSense

2 Spice ups
6

It depends.

The “risk” is not so much that it’s insecure, it’s more than consumer gear (routers in particular for some reason) can have shitty firmware that might cope fine with a couple of users but freaks out with half a dozen people browsing all day.

If all you need is basic “Allow everything out” connectivity it might be fine, time will tell.

3 Spice ups
7

As hutchingsp said, these are more built for the home environment where you will have a few uses and maybe 1 voip line.

I wouldn’t call it un-professional to be using one, as these sometimes come with Broadband packages anyway. The difference you’ll see is when you need to do more advanced things like port forwarding to several machine, Site-to-Site VPN and remote users, then the consumer grade will flake out.

Look into the Draytek (2860 we tend to use) line of routers, we used them and love them.

8

I’ve seen small companies get by fine for years with consumer routers and access points. It can work but it’s a trade-off. They are simpler but do less. A lower priced enterprise router will give you more power, features, and (hopefully) piece of mind.

9

Consumer routers have almost no security features. Yes, they all feature a statefull firewall, but that’s it. No IDS/IPS. No gateway AV functions.

If it were my business, I’d want, at the very least, a unified threat manager (UTM) sitting between my network and the world. Low end gear from Sophos, Watchguard, Fortinet, etc. are a good fit here.

1 Spice up
10

I think a home router would be suffice. On the other hand it is a bit unprofessional. Once it works the way it should I think you have yourself a happy customer

11

Don’t know about unprofessional, but I guess it could seem that way. Traditionally, low-cost home routers generally are not a good fit for the office for reasons of security, speed, features, support. Some higher-end home routers might be better on speed or features but may still lack in other areas. This is in a general sense from my opinion and experiences…you may find specific exceptions that fit well.

12

We use a top of the line Netgear consumer router for our Domain WiFi, it sits behind our firewall and spam filters so it’s really secure, and it’s used as just an access point with our DHCP server giving out addresses. This has worked flawlessly for the limited amount of connections we use. I wouldn’t use it if we didn’t have anything between it and the outside world though.

I know I may get flogged for doing this by someone, or many, but it’s what we use.

13

I would go ahead and look at pfSense (They also sell the hardware if your so inclined.) but pfSense can run off of commodity PC hardware both in x86 and x86-64.

Here is a link to a setup video / intro to pfSense: Here

Also you can look at Edge Routers

14

No Flogging from me. Like you said if your edge perimeter is secure and you are just using it as an access point I do not see a problem using a higher end consumer WiFi router in a smaller office. Heck, the top end consumer Netgear’s even support WPA/WPA2 Enterprise connections.

15

If it works it works, but be aware of any wide-spread hacks available for the firmware. Consumer routers aren’t known for being built super securely, and vulnerabilities pop up often, and usually without any sort of automated update procedures. Depending on your WAN speed, you might also run into problems with VoIP quality if you can’t prioritize VoIP traffic, as you can with higher-grade routers.

pfSense, ClearOS, Sophos UTM etc on common hardware would be one cheap-ish upgrade possibility, as would a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. Be aware that out of the box, Edgerouters don’t actually pass traffic, so they do require some set-up and know-how. But after that, they’re great for the money.