ZyXEL ZyWALL 1.6 Gbps VPN Firewall, recommended for up to 100 users [ZYWALL110]

I like the router, and it seems faster than the USG generation of routers it replaces. It's also very nice to be rid of the pay to play options in the USG router and the nag screens that went with them. You also get a great deal more VPNs for the money than most routers as well as a couple of free SSL VPN connections. Note that this router is a little larger than the USG 100, so if you are going to rack mount it don't lose the brackets because the older USG 100 and Zywall 5/35 series brackets won't fit.The only reason it doesn't get five stars is that I think I've found a bug in the firewall rule processing where a rule that's meant to only affect traffic coming across the VPN was also getting tripped by local lan traffic. I was able to circumvent the problem by re-ordering the rules, but that's not a true fix. I emailed Zyxel about this over a week ago and never heard back, so a star gets deducted for bad technical support.For those who are moving up from consumer grade routers please be aware that you will have to spend a few hours learning how to configure this router. If you have some networking knowledge you should be able to figure it out, as it's nowhere near as complex as having to learn something like Cisco IOS, but you will have to know more than what is necessary to configure a Linksys or Netgear router, especially if you intend to use some of the advanced features like VPNs.All in all it's worth the money.=====================Edit 11/22/2015Been using this router for a couple years now, and the more I use it the better I like it. I'm using some of the more advanced features now like virtual WAN interfaces and DNAT and SNAT based on WAN IP address. These all work great. The last coupe of firmware updates have significantly decreased the CPU usage for VPN encryption which resulted in greater VPN throughput. I have two of these and neither of them have crashed or had to be reset. One of them ran for 9 months without a restart in between firmware upgrades.

This is a replacement firewall for the Zyxel USG-20-VPN as that model continually has issues with my home Internet speed (940M/35M). This firewall is able to maintain the download and upload speeds. The only big drawback is the price for licensing for the add-ons. Individual or packaged licenses are still > $800. Not practical for home or home lab. If someone was looking for a good firewall for a small business, this is a good choice.

I went from used surplus server hardware on ebay running either pfsense or endian firewall to this ZyWALL 310 firewall. I could not be more happy that I did. In fact I should have done it much sooner. Even when the three fans on the back of the unit are at full speed during a bootup it is still much quieter than my Sun V20z or V60x servers that used to be my firewalls. It's like night and day. After bootup the fans throttle back to half speed and while I can still hear it they really don't bother me. As other reviewers have said it sounds like a laptop fan under stress that's it. Very tolerable in my opinion and this is important because I don't have a server closet. I telecommute to work from my home office and I have a half height server rack in my home office. There are three cisco SGP200-26 switches in that rack along with this zywall 310 firewall right next to my desk. I am able to work comfortably with this equipment in my office. This firewall software is a bit different than am I used to and while I do have some prior experience setting firewall rules I am not by any means a network engineer. Even so I was able to get this firewall up and running in a basic configuration in a short amount of time. The default rules they provide basically allows all outgoing traffic from all the lans and the dmz to the wan port. So it's just a matter of adding a few rules to block some services like ftp, telnet, pop3 and smtp that use plain text passwords. I also updated the firmware for the unit after registering it on zywall's website. The firmware update is very easy and there is a video on youtube that shows how to do it. Finally, the performance I am getting is phenomenal. With my pfsense or endian firewalls I could not break past the 100Mb/sec download rate. With this unit I immediately smashed through it and was downloading at the full 240 Mb/sec that my service allows. For me the benefits were obvious1. Less noise in my office (except when I need to fire up my sun servers for development work)2. Less heat being generated in my office3. Faster download speeds4. Nice and tidy fit in my server rackI am happy I purchased the unit and I recommend it to anyone who just wants to get their work done without too much hassle.

Product had a catastrophic internal failure (soft lockup on internal CPU) - product was purchased March 23, 2016, shipped March 26th, meaning it arrived no earlier than March 28th. Product wasn't even installed until COVID hit in 2020 (we had a Cisco ASA that was working fine), has only been installed for less than 1 year, and it already failed. Called and spoke to a very nice support person, who would have replaced if he could, but management would not honor warranty. I asked to speak to them, and he offered to escalate. They didn't want to talk to me then, and wanted to call me back "later".DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THESE PRODUCTS. Stick with manufacturers who actually build a quality product that will last longer than a year installed. I'm headed down to boot up our decade old Cisco ASA to be our stopgap until I buy something newer.

Very high end product. Works well but definitely a steep learning curve.

Technically sound so far. (Uptime ~ 12 weeks now). Like many though, I have to state that the documentation is terrible/awful/dreadful/inaccurate/incomplete. :(