Verizon FIOS modem -> Firewall --> Switch --> Cat5 to computers and SIP phones, wireless access point * You absolutely want a firewall. Defense in depth. A f

Verizon FIOS modem -> Firewall --> Switch --> Cat5 to computers and SIP phones, wireless access point * You absolutely want a firewall. Defense in depth. A firewall that supports a VPN that runs on your office's laptops is very handy for working from home or the road. We have a Watchguard Firebox firewall. It works well but is very annoying to configure: the primary configuration mechanism is a Windows program, but I run linux, so that just pisses me off. The secondary mechanism is a web page running Flash (I dislike flash). The configuration is a very leaky abstraction, with further pisses me off. * For the switch(es), you definitely want a "small business" managed switch ($500 and up) that supports RMON/SNMP. (We have some old Linksys/Cisco "managed" switches with no RMON - cannot tell me where my traffic is going - and can only be configured with IE 7 or older(!!!) POSes!!!). * For wireless, I installed the Ubiquity UniFi wireless access points (threw away some older Cisco WAPs that were POSes). If you only have one AP, this is overkill... we have several of them to cover our facility. The system is very reasonable and the central management is very very convenient. The primary interface to the software is Flash (ugh) - but it works well enough. There are other ways of interacting with the controller, but I have not much that way (I have written some MongoDB scripts to extract useful information nightly). * You are also going to need DHCP, DNS, etc. Windows Server with Active Directory is dominant at businesses. Linux and OSX interoperate fairly well with AD. LDAP (and Kerberos if you want single-sign-in) would be the alternative to AD. Being a linuxhead, I would run a Debian/Ubuntu server with bind (DNS) and isc-dhcp-server (DHCP) - that is what I'm running at home and it works well. You will probably (eventually) want to run Icinga/Nagios/equivalent and Cacti/equivalent to monitor your systems on this server as well. * I assume your SIP phones will be using a SAAS outside company PBX. I don't have experience with that, we have an on-site PBX (predates me, and is now obsolete).