I have basically a full rack of equipment. Here's the network side of it all. My desktop is 2 SPF+ fiber connections back to the core switch. Tons of stuff in my rack is all 10gbps or 40gbps.
Dual opnsense firewalls (top 2 slots, dual 40gbps connecting to core switches), though one is inactive until they let me buy static addresses. I run some business stuff on this. Boatloads of homelabbing and self-learning.
If you want to do full IPS/IDS, then yes you need some horsepower. But just connection with basic rules there's plenty out there that's not super expensive. Ubiquiti has their dream machine line which even the "cheap" $400 one can do 10gbps (2gbps with ips, or something like that. I dunno, I don't keep tabs on them).
I didn't stop any active connections/downloads happening on the network. I very likely had a gig of other stuff going elsewhere on the network.
Their "smart-nid" is also a router... so that works too, but I don't trust it and in my setup it's in transparent mode.
Edit: Formatting sucked
I've been repeatedly told by everyone I talk to over there that it's not ready yet... still... even though it was supposed to be ready by end of Q2 this year.
Calling them today still yielded the same answer for me.
I'm forced to use DDNS and a service to route my emails for me. But email and PBX servers really don't do well on DDNS type stuff.