Back in the summer of 2020 I purchased a home firewall at a cost of £130 – it seemed a reasonable investment as my annual renewal of my Bitdefender Antivirus was around £80 anyway and I wanted to have an extra layer of protection for my home network.
After several months of using the BitDefender Box I can say it has been a really positive experience, there are some frustrations with it such as the lack of features you would expect from a Home Firewall such as being able to setup firewall rules (You can set up Device profile rules) and the fact it can only be managed from an app from your phone or tablet, although it is pretty cool you can do that – but why can’t we just manage it via an app on the computer or via a WebGUI?
The fact every device on your home network is protected and you can spin up a Guest Network quite quickly via the Central App as an extra layer of protection (You just don’t know what malicious software could be on anyone’s phone, even if they are friends and family)
The product is well build and lightweight – although it is hidden from view it has a nice modern design which would sit nicely on a desk or unit within the house.
For £129.99, it is worth the investment for the extra layer of protection, you can really see what is going on, on your network and stay up to date with real-time notifications if anyone tried accessing a restricted website or if a new device connects to the network for the first time.
You can see your protected traffic within a 24 hour period, I would have loved an on-going log to see trends over weeks / months rather than 24 hours to see how much data my household is actually using and there is no way to view live firewall logs (let me rephrase that, ANY firewall logs) which defeats the objective of a firewall for those who might like to review / monitor traffic going through their network.
All devices on your network are protected by this clever box, if you have Alexa or Google smart devices in your home (Or any IoT device) these also become protected and you can enable “Privacy” Mode on the app which disables the network connection for all smart speakers to ensure they cannot be used/listen / record.
