Good morning, appreciate the response. Below is the follow-up to your questions.
As far as I can tell, it looks like the Route10 is about to the point where it has most features needed. What I was trying to communicate was that at launch, it was not near a point of features to be of real use in a production environment. I know many were stated as “Coming Soon”, I guess the concern is what does that actually mean from a timeline perspective. The hype around the product generated some excitement, as I mentioned, it seems to be a good mix of hardware, but the let down at release and soon after was that it really couldn’t do what was needed for a production environment. I don’t recall exactly when it was actually released, but here we are in March of 2025 and it still cannot support failover WAN. I really can’t comment on how the IDS/IPS works or reporting capabilities as I no longer have the device to test.
For me, must have features would be: Multi-WAN with failover, IDS/IPS with comprehensive reporting. Region and application blocking (I know you can do app blocking at the AP level, not sure it is there yet in the Route10 or with wired connections), with comprehensive reporting on what is being blocked and why. The reporting is huge in my opinion. If you have ever had to diagnose something not working properly, without knowing exactly what is being blocked and why, it can become a huge time drain tracking things down. Almost every install we do has a guest component to it, having the ability to keep the guest WiFi family friendly or prevent things like torrenting is also very important. From a support and management standpoint, having Wireguard VPN capabilities are also important to us. And of course, speed, how fast can it do all these things and how much traffic can it route…
My personal preference is self hosted, but for customer installs, a local hardware controller makes more sense. This really aligns with my initial theme, I’m hesitant to use a cloud based controller that I cannot control or have visibility into it’s changes. Having screens change, icons show up, new menu items appear without any notice or documentation creates risk for me. Here is a good real-world example.
We did an install and setup for a small local oil change business. The owner’s son “knows computers” (yes these words always cause me to shutter…). They want to manage their install with minimal support from us. This means we need to be able to educate him on what the interface is, what it does, where to make changes if needed and where to NOT make changes. We tell them when it is time to do an upgrade and explain what should or should not be done after each upgrade. A local controller would be the only option I would have in this instance, as the cloud one is too dynamic.
It was actually a bit of a surprise. I honestly do not know what exactly is being pushed up to the cloud or why. We put a local HW controller in the lab when we did the evaluation, so my expectation was to see very little Internet based traffic, there seemed to be a lot and honestly we didn’t dig in deep enough to see what or why.
Honestly, I don’t recall if this article existed at the time we were evaluating. What we did find were some forum posts that related to it that seem to go into much more detail on when this kicks in. Here is a good example (I just wanted a link to the post, the forum seems to be adding a synopsis which is a bit confusing in this context - so please ignore the following synopsis and focus on the link to the post).
This post documents exactly when the fallback feature kicks in:
- ICMP (ping) replies from the APs gateway
- ICMP (ping) replies from ping.alta.inc
This information is not included in the knowledge article, but I really think this is the level of detail that should be in any knowledge article.
Sadly, not a fan at all! We actually triggered it by accident (blocking Internet access) and spent way too much time trying to figure out what happened. Honestly, I want my APs to be APs, I want them to do a great job of being an AP. DHCP is not their job. I feel the same way about DPI and blocking.
When you read the Knowledge Article, it makes it sound like it is there to protect the absent minded admin. If I screw up DHCP leases or VLAN assignments, this is going to present itself as a problem somewhere and generally it is pretty straight forward to diagnose and resolve. The fallback features actually makes the diagnostics more complicated because there are several other environmental issues that can trigger it beyond my own incompetence (which to be honest, I’m not a fan of the implication in the article).
Possibly, having both is a good thing. I don’t recall how much historical data we had or how well we could use it for analysis. We typically watch trends and look for anomalies. Recently we saw a spike of Internet usage at a site that ran for several hours late at night into the morning, which was not characteristic for this particular site. Our concern was that maybe someone had made their way in and was up to no good. What really happened was an employee left their ipad on their desk streaming Amazon Video all night. It took just a few minutes to diagnose and track this down. I don’t know if the current interface for Alta would have allowed something like that.
I understand why you would want to have a presence on Amazon, eBay, etc. I suspect it is as much for protecting the brand as it is opening up a direct channel to consumers. I probably didn’t do a good job of explaining my issue with the approach.
I generally quote MSRP pricing on everything. This is where I make some money is the margin on the hardware. When direct to consumer sites (like Amazon) have better pricing than MSRP (such as bundle deals, etc.) it is more of a reputation issue for me. I don’t want to quote a price and have a customer come back and say “hey I found it cheaper on Amazon”. Not worried about being under sold as installer pricing is good. Let me caveat this - I took a quick look yesterday to see our distributors had similar bundles like I see on Amazon, I didn’t see anything but I didn’t look all that hard. What this means for me, before I could do a quote to a customer, I have to research the direct to consumer sites to see if there are any “deals” out there and then account for that in my quote. To put it simply, I’m not willing to add that overhead to my quoting process. It isn’t about me not being able to get good pricing, it is about my reputation.
Again - I do appreciate the dialog. I realize I’m calling the baby ugly at times and I am only a single, small voice is a sea of users.
Thank you.