Will Intel AC3160 and/or 802.11ac be supported in the GUI any time soon?
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I have a chance to use one of these cards for dual band support and wanted to know if 802.11ac is going to be added to the GUI any time in the next 3 months, 6 months or 12 months.
Any developers or admins who can weigh in?
We are looking to replace some aging Soekris boxes and want to use newer wifi technology.
Thank you.
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I would say no.. Wifi under freebsd is really just not a viable option as AP.. If you want wifi AC or actually good wifi at all, with current features - spend a couple of bucks and get an actual AP.. or 2 or 3, etc. So $20 wifi router used as AP would be far better than anything thing you could expect to run under freebsd/pfsense.
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It's really a question if the hardware vendors would change their support policies in that time frame and in such a way that developing FreeBSD drivers (native and with source code) for the hardware would become viable. All the signs so far indicate a big no.
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in the first place, intel wifi chipset is never been seen supporting in AP mode.
so yeah, you will never see a AP mode support on that wifi chipset probably forever.
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God I hope not. Pfsense is first and foremost a firewall, and an industrial strength at that and does that job well. It has some routing functionality because well, there could be multi-WAN and multi-LAN to deal with, but now u want to throw WIFI at it, like the rest of the world are selling you these all-in-one boxes, Jack of all Trades and Master of None?
In a robust environment, a box should do a specific job, I would rather have pfSense extend to layer-4, layer-5 processing etc. WIFI to me is really an ancillary function and needs to be deployed, physically, often, away from the "closet."
Keep your front door security separate from WIFI.
