@cmb:
The TTL is just indicative of how many hops it takes to reach the destination. Which is up to your ISP generally, though if you have really screwy internal routing with multiple routers, that could be attributable to your internal network.
Do you recognize any of those 10.x.x.x IPs in hops 2-10 there? The latency is high enough that they'd almost have to be on your ISP's network. And probably in two different locations judging by the latency difference (hops 2-4 close to you, 5-10 maybe 200-400 miles away). Something different with the WAN as it's configured on pfSense is being treated much differently by your ISP, and being routed an unusual-looking path. ISP routers shouldn't reply from private IP sources. Some will, with public IPs becoming more scarce, but only for a hop or two generally. I've never seen an ISP with private IPs across 10 consecutive hops.
That traceroute shows higher latency getting to a real Internet router than you're describing to reach Google plugged directly into the modem.
CMB,
I now do feel rather stupid….LOL .. So looking at this, when my desktop "pings google" it's pinging a ISP server apparently, thus showing average latency being 10-15ms where real google server resides at the 216.58.217.206 IP. Ping 74.125.224.72 resulted in the same latency as the pfSense box and TTL.
I guess, at this point, I need to figure out why the network seemed to be "much slower" than it does when not going through pfSense, and why it keeps dropping out when connected as well.
Thanks again! :)