The equipment in a small office or home office will not be the same as the equipment at the corporate facility. There is a big difference in the size, functionality, and costs associated with SOHO network devices for the following reasons:
- The network size is smaller
- Power requirements are smaller
- Other environmental limitations
- Financial considerations
- Lower impact (devices serve few users compared to hundreds of users)
SOHO devices usually offer less features compared with enterprise-level devices, including:
- Bandwidth and throughput
- Number of users that can be served
- Redundancy features
- Management features
- Upgrade capabilities
- Advanced support services
- “Exotic” and non-critical features
Devices used in the corporate environment are usually designed for multi-Gigabit speeds and they offer many available interfaces, but a SOHO location doesn’t have the same requirements. SOHO devices do not support the same high-speed connections that corporate devices do because this is not needed in small or home locations, mainly because of the reduced number of users that have to share the connection bandwidth.
Another important difference between corporate and SOHO networks is the level of redundancy that is required. This directly relates to the business impact of possible network downtime. In a corporate environment, if the network goes down, many people and services are affected and the financial loss can be huge. On the other hand, if a SOHO network goes down, only a few people are affected and no major loss occurs until the faulty device is manually replaced with a spare one. This is why SOHO-specific devices do not generally use a high level of redundancy and advanced high-availability features.
The management capabilities also differ between high-end equipment and SOHO devices. On corporate networks, devices are usually managed via the command line interface, which offers a high level of control and granularity. On the other hand, SOHO devices are either unmanaged or they offer basic Web-based management capabilities. This makes the troubleshooting and diagnostic process difficult but this compromise is acceptable as long as the impact of a SOHO device failure is low.
Corporate-level equipment usually offers a lot of options for upgrading, mostly based on modularity, because the network environment changes often and overprovisioning might need to be performed when new users or services become active. However, SOHO devices do not offer such capabilities because they are rarely upgraded due to the limited number of users they serve.