Current high speed firewalls process up to 5 or 6 Gb/s of data traffic due to internal CPU speed and forwarding engines. Often special hardware is used to allow this high throughput. A market overview of high speed firewalls as of August 2006 can be accessed at DGrid.

Current routers could act as a packet screen as long as it fits the needs of a local security policy. A performance of tens of Gb/s could be achieved. But only a limited number of routers is able to handle extended access lists to allow stateful inspection. If any stateful inspection has to be done a “packet screen” solution is insufficient.