I have 1gb fiber up & down. Current consumer grade
mesh system shows consistent 950-ish speeds at the
wire.
The consumer grade router comes often sorted with an ASIC or an FPGA and is only routing not more! It is doing
SPI and NAT and that`s it. pfSense is a firewall and on top
it can be turned into a fully UTM device with captive portal
and voucher system over sms if needed. So if you say today you will 100 % know what you will be installing and using or how much you will turn it into "something" including ids and pfblocker-ng rules it might be the best
to work two different roads;
You will get nearly the use case you know before
that all is matching and running fine for you.
You will be buying a "diy" rig (pfSense box) that comes with much power in backgrounbd you and be able to push it up if needed with ram, ssd and wifi or LTE if needed.
Squid & SquidGuard, ClamAV, IDS, pfBlocker-ng, firewall, = UTM
If I’m understanding you correctly I would be better
served with more cores over clock speed and 8-16gb
RAM plus some hard drive space?
With not using PPPoE, yes of course this might be the best solution for you in my eyes, because;
you will be able to balance the wan queues over the CPU cores, so they count.
If you need more ram you should be able to insert it fast
If you need a greater ssd space you will be able set it up
if you need wifi with captive portal for your clients you will be able to realize it.
you turn on more rules and lists for suricata snort or pfblocker-ng you have not problems at all!
As noted a few posts up I had a Mac Mini drop in my
lap and would at least like to try to use it to help keep
my costs low. However, getting a reliable and fast
working device over cost savings.
Make sure that the usb port to ethernet adapter is not your wan, it is often reasigning and then you will be
really p****d by configuring it new.
The Mac Mini is a dual core i7 4578U @ 3.0ghz
with 16gb DDR3 and a 256gb SSD. Based on what
you said my concern is I need a quad core or more.
3,0 GHz CPU
4C / 4T or 4C / 8T
8 - 16 GB
64 GB - xyz GB/TB (M.2 / miniPCIe slot)
able to add 2 WiFi cards
Would be my setup in your situation based on what you were telling here around.
So this is what you will see it is nice to go only with the things you need pfSense such suricata, firewall and and and, for this they are selling appliances, being sure you will be on the save site or you will be setting up your own rig, you should be better sorted using the two way;
near by the point all is running
build a box with much backspace horse power.
What I was getting out of this forum actual I mean, if
netgate is able to offer you a box matching your needs go with it, if not or you will be unsure you should buy supermicro C3000 board with much ECC Ram and a mSATA to come closer to your needs, if not able go with an used E3-xxxxv5 and a miniITX board with one or two PCIe slots and ecc ram and M.2 or mSATA with it you will never fail in 80% of all cases, all other cases are greater companies with many more employees and services running.