All in on Firewalla... except the switch! ugh!
Bought a Gold Plus back in 2023 to pair with Frontier fiber and it's been rock solid. Easily the best networking purchase I've made in years. The problem is everything sitting behind it.
As an IT executive it's hard to admit this, but here's what my home network actually looks like right now:
Gold Plus & Eero in the wiring closet... another Eero downstairs pretending to be mesh... a Ruckus wireless controller and 3 ceiling-mounted Ruckus PoE APs left behind when we bought the house... and a Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole as DNS for everything, because the Eero ad blocker and the Firewalla ad blocker kept butting heads and I needed a referee.
I'm done. I want a single ecosystem so when something breaks at 11pm my wife and kids don't scream at me while I dig through three different management UIs.
I just ordered 3x AP7's to retire the Ruckus gear and a Cisco WS-C3650CX-12 to wire in the APs and run ethernet to the smart home hubs (Hue, SmartThings, Lutron, the usual shit show) as well as wired to the bedrooms/loft/fam room just in case because I'm old school.
...then I saw the "Help us make the Firewalla Switch" thread.
Consider this my vote, loudly. You already own the gateway in my house. With the AP7's you now own the wireless layer. The only piece left is L2 and PoE distribution. I love Cisco professionally, but I genuinely do not want to live in IOS - I thought I'd graduated from that shit. If you ship a managed PoE switch that lives in the ecosystem alongside the Gold Plus and the AP7s, with VLANs that auto-sync to my firewall policies, I would preorder it the second it goes live.
My ask is simple: 8 or 12-port SKUs, multi-gig (a couple of 10G uplinks would be the cherry on top), healthy PoE+ budget, fanless or near-silent, and the same beautiful UX as the rest of the lineup. Same pricing philosophy too. You've nailed "prosumer with adult-level features" in every product so far, please don't drift upmarket on the switch.
Firewalla team, if there's any way to nudge this onto the 2026 roadmap, please do it. I'm hoping the AP's will ship next week and I will absolutely throw the Cisco in the heap for a Firewalla Switch the day it's is announced. Heck, I'll beta test if you need it!