First Home Network

limegorilla · January 27, 2020

Okay - so I have finally had enough of my ISP router. It's shitty, slow and - apparently rather susceptible to attacks due to it's slow and outdated Intel hardware.

For reference - I am on Virgin Media M350 (Downloads between 300 - 400 Mb, Uploads 40 Mb) and I do a lot of local stuff.

So I have been looking around, and so far have come to the conclusion that:

As I like to play around, and really customise pretty much everything - pfSense is the way to go.
Running it off an ex-enterprise server off eBay is the way to go
Preferably the AP I get should be Wifi 6
I'll want to use cat6a cabling

But I do have a few questions:

Ubiquiti seems to be the de-facto standard anywhere I go, and by the looks of it, the software is the reason. As they don't seem to have an available Access Point with Wifi 6, other than a gaming one that I'm not interested in (I would prefer the standalone AP's) should I go Ubiquiti now, or shop for another brand with an AX AP?
Does pfSense prefer cores or clock speed? From what I can see it is reliably run on Raspberry Pi's so I should assume a server would be miles more powerful. Also - what about RAM? Faster or more of it?
Where is the best place to get Ubiquiti devices? I live in the UK and most of the retailers Ubiquiti list are business only/prices on demand, etc. I've seen them on Amazon, but if anyone knows somewhere better for the UK I am all ears

Again, my internet speeds are around D350/U40 and I will be doing quite a bit of local files (video file server for example)

Thanks very much!

Edited January 27, 2020 by limegorilla
Added question, formatting

Alex Atkin UK · January 28, 2020

Firstly, AFAIK you wont be able to replace the Virgin Media router, you can only switch it into bridge/modem mode. This is not necessarily a bad thing though, unless its the modem part that you were having issues with.

An ex-enterprise server might be cheap to buy, but its going to use FAR more electricity than a dedicated low-end appliance designed for something like pfSense.

Its a very bad time to buy into WiFi 6 as its not even expected to be fully ratified until the end of this year, its not yet feature complete and WiFi 6e is potentially on the way giving us a brand new WiFi frequency band to play with.

I recently bought a UniFi nanoHD with the intent of going to WiFi 6 in a few years, once all the dust has settled and proper implementations are released.

pfSense currently prefers clock speed I believe, particularly if you ever to use OpenVPN which is not multi-threaded. But generally its a balance of both as the actual packet filtering (routing) is multi-threaded.

limegorilla · January 28, 2020

11 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Firstly, AFAIK you wont be able to replace the Virgin Media router, you can only switch it into bridge/modem mode. This is not necessarily a bad thing though, unless its the modem part that you were having issues with.

I am aware. You can just spoof the MAC address as Virgin does not do periodic checks - only when your IP changes, which is about once every three months. I'm looking into it, but would most likely keep the Virgin Hub as a modem for now

11 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

An ex-enterprise server might be cheap to buy, but its going to use FAR more electricity than a dedicated low-end appliance designed for something like pfSense.

What kind of devices would you suggest? My other option is going entirely ubiquiti, then using a cloud key to tie them together - which doesnt sound like a bad idea to be honest - but money is a factor. So what kind of hardware?

11 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Its a very bad time to buy into WiFi 6 as its not even expected to be fully ratified until the end of this year, its not yet feature complete and WiFi 6e is potentially on the way giving us a brand new WiFi frequency band to play with.

I recently bought a UniFi nanoHD with the intent of going to WiFi 6 in a few years, once all the dust has settled and proper implementations are released.

What kind of speeds do you get on that? I have quite a lot of devices (many are Smart Home ones, on 2.5GHz but I do have a lot of devices) will that stand up to quite a bit of load?

mtz_federico · January 28, 2020

1 minute ago, limegorilla said:

What kind of devices would you suggest? My other option is going entirely ubiquiti, then using a cloud key to tie them together - which doesnt sound like a bad idea to be honest - but money is a factor. So what kind of hardware?

You could build a computer and install pfsense or buy a pfsense appliance like the SG-1100 or the SG-3100 from netgate (the company that makes pfsense)