TP-Link Festa FR205 Gigabit VPN Router

TP-Link Gigabit VPN Router (Festa FR205) - 3 Years Local Warranty

The Festa FR205 is a compact wired VPN router for small business: five Gigabit ports with load balancing across up to three WANs, 20 IPsec tunnels, a USB 2.0 port for an LTE dongle, and cloud management through the Festa Cloud-Based Controller. It has no Wi-Fi of its own and is designed to sit behind separate access points.

A Wired Gateway, Not a Wireless Router

The FR205 has no Wi-Fi. TP-Link publishes no wireless standards, signal rate or antenna specification for it, because there is no radio in the box. It is a wired gateway intended to sit in front of Festa access points, which handle the wireless side. If you need routing and Wi-Fi in one unit, the FR365 is the model in this range that has both. This is a common and expensive ordering mistake, so it is worth confirming before purchase.

Load Balancing Across Up to Three WAN Lines

Of the five Gigabit ports, one is a dedicated WAN, two are switchable WAN or LAN and two are LAN, so up to three broadband lines can run at once. Intelligent load balance distributes sessions across them, application-optimised routing pins chosen traffic to a chosen line, and link backup with timing and failover takes over automatically when a line drops, with online detection watching each one.

20 IPsec Tunnels for Site-to-Site Links

The FR205 supports 20 IPsec VPN tunnels in LAN-to-LAN and client-to-LAN modes, with IKE v1 and v2, main and aggressive negotiation, DES through AES256, IPsec failover, NAT traversal, dead peer detection and perfect forward secrecy. Measured IPsec throughput is around 260 Mbps on SHA1 and SHA256 with AES256, but drops sharply to roughly 38 Mbps on SHA384 and SHA512 — a large enough difference that your choice of cipher suite should be deliberate rather than default.

PPTP, L2TP and OpenVPN as Well

Beyond IPsec the router carries 16 PPTP tunnels with MPPE encryption, 16 L2TP tunnels including L2TP over IPsec, and 50 OpenVPN tunnels in certificate-plus-account or full mode. Measured throughput is 21.70 Mbps on OpenVPN, 77.31 Mbps encrypted on L2TP and 75.80 Mbps encrypted on PPTP. TP-Link notes the FR205 can act as a VPN client connecting to up to 10 servers.

Fanless, Steel, and Very Small

At 158 x 100.7 x 25.4 mm in a steel enclosure with no fan, the FR205 fits on a shelf, a wall or the back of a cabinet and makes no noise. Maximum power consumption is 7.94 W, which is low enough that a small UPS will carry it for a useful time during an outage. It takes an external 12 V / 1 A adapter and ships with an Ethernet cable, quick installation guide and silicone feet.

Managed Centrally, or Standalone

Adopted into the Festa Cloud-Based Controller it provisions itself and is administered from the Festa App or Festa Web Portal alongside the switches and access points on site, with auto topology, multi-site management, batch firmware and configuration, integrated troubleshooting, SNMP v1/v2c/v3, port mirroring, syslog and dynamic DNS. It can equally be configured standalone through its own web interface.

Ideal For

Singapore small offices, professional practices and branch sites that need site-to-site VPN and multi-line failover behind their own access points, and installers who want a small, silent, low-draw gateway that reports into a central console. Supplied by SourceIT with local Singapore warranty, GST invoice and project pricing on request.