Mailing the story:

I am the network administrator for a healthcare company. When I joined that company, there was internet access through ISDN dial-in (PPP), which was done by a SuSE linux box some guy had set up. But my boss wanted something better, so we took a little time to investigate.

We decided for SDSL and a commercial firewall (Astaro), which is based on free and open source. That was a clever decision, as it now shows.