Privacy Tool Spotlight: Firewalla Switch SE

We rarely have those Philip J. Fry "Shut up and take my money!" moments, but when Firewalla opened pre-orders for the Firewalla Switch SE beta in early summer 2026, we did exactly that. Managed switches are one of the biggest pain points for people who are not network engineers, because the terminology gets technical fast. We had been watching the community boards for a switch that works natively with Firewalla, so we jumped at the chance to join the early release list. Our unmanaged switch worked fine, but the "what ifs" were too tempting to ignore. What if a switch supported both traditional VLANs and Firewalla's VqLANs? What if it managed rules by device instead of by physical port? What if it packed PoE+ and 10Gb SFP+ uplinks into a single fanless box? Our unit arrived ready to test, and just like the rest of the ecosystem, the setup was completely seamless. Setup stays in the app you already use, and wired devices get the same rules as everything else on the network. The Network…