We Already Have a Firewall Why Do We Need Bumblebee CPE?

A common question customers ask is:

“We already have a firewall, why do we need Bumblebee CPE?”

Bumblebee CPE and Firewall

This is a great question. Let’s explain.

Different Roles

A firewall and Bumblebee CPE play different roles in your network.

• A firewall implements security policies and helps keep your site secure.

• Bumblebee CPE focuses on ensuring your Internet connection has the least possible downtime (minimal MTTR). It does this by providing a set of purpose-built tools that help both you and your service provider quickly pinpoint the faulty segment, identify slow parts of the network, and share clear data evidence. This eliminates finger-pointing and unresolved tickets.

Purpose-Built Features: Bumblebee CPE Compared to Firewall

Below is a set of key features available on Bumblebee CPE that are typically not available on standard firewalls.

Features	Description	Bumblebee CPE	Firewall
Instant Fault Isolation	Identifies whether an outage is middle-mile or last-mile problem	✅	❌
WAN Health Link Modeling	Uses complex models of WAN health to alert on degradation	✅	❌
AI Post Mortem Analysis	Performs root cause analysis on outages and failures	✅	❌
3-year outage History	Stores long-term outage records	✅	❌
Path Visualization	Clearly shows where a failure occurs	✅	❌
Link Utilization Trend	Monitors long-term link utilization to right-size bandwidth and avoid congestion or application failures	✅	❌
Speed Tests	Runs HTTPS speed tests on both WAN and LAN to isolate connectivity and performance issues	✅	❌
Cellular Failover	Improves uptime from two nines to four nines	✅	❌
Shared Observability	Gives both you and the service provider access to the same Bumblebee portal and data. No more finger-pointing.	✅	❌
Application Insight	Advanced troubleshooting to distinguish true ISP issues, VPN issues, or application issues	✅	❌

Minimal MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution)

Bumblebee CPE and your firewall play complementary roles. The firewall keeps your site secure, while Bumblebee CPE keeps your network highly available with minimal downtime (minimal MTTR).They work together, not against each other, to deliver a more reliable and transparent Internet experience.