[asterisk-users] Which router/firewall would you use for a virtual-PBX Asterisk installation?

[Ernie Dunbar]

Hi everyone.

We've got a fairly large base of customers who use our Asterisk server 
for phone service in a virtual PBX kind of way, where the server is 
security hardened and exposed to the internet for them to connect to 
remotely with SIP and IAX. It's certainly not the sort of affair where 
we're running it as a PBX just within the building. As a result, we see 
network traffic coming through eth0 between 512 Kbps and about 3.0 Mbps, 
depending on the time of day.

We haven't so far been using a hardware firewall/router on our server 
network, but it's becoming increasingly clear that we need to. We have 
enough experience to know that Asterisk is pretty sensitive when it 
comes to network hardware in our situation - we've had to replace one 
otherwise perfectly good 100 Mbps network switch because it simply 
wasn't able to keep up with the amount of streaming audio we put through 
it, and it badly affected voice quality. We have other traffic flowing 
through our server network too, including a significant amount of e-mail 
and web traffic, although that's not quite as sensitive to the quality 
of our network hardware.

If you've got these large requirements for Asterisk, I'd love to hear 
what you use for a router, and whether that router has met your needs. 
It would also be nice to hear about what kinds of routers to avoid that 
you may have tried in the past and found lacking.