excerpted from....
Have DSL And Firewalls, Will Telecommute
March 25, 2002
By John Rendleman
INFORMATIONWEEK.COM
"This week, 3Com Corp. will introduce its OfficeConnect Cable/DSL Secure Gateway, an all-in-one home-networking device with a street price of $250. 3Com's latest product falls into the category of residential gateways, a new breed of equipment that also includes vendors such as Linksys and Netgear. They offer a range of home-networking functions in one device. The products typically combine a DSL or cable modem, an Ethernet switch, a firewall, and VPN capabilities.
The 3Com device has a single Ethernet connection at speeds as fast as 50 Mbps to a DSL or cable-modem connection to the outside world and contains a four-port 10/100 Ethernet switch, which can support up to 253 users. But it will likely support fewer than that in most home-office setups, says Robert Winch, director of product management for small-business products at 3Com.
The gateway also contains a stateful inspection firewall and a VPN tunnel server, as well as triple Digital Encryption Standard and 168-bit public key encryption, network address translation, and a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol server, Winch says. 3Com is able to offer as many functions as it does on the gateway because chipmakers can supply application-specific integrated circuits with many of the functions already built-in at low cost, supplemented by software that's fairly easy to develop, he says. Over time, devices will include even more capabilities as "more and more of these functions are combined into one device," which simplifies matters for telecommuters, he says."
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