More firewall request

Just a bit of background information on myself and my firewall request. Personally, I've been a geek since I bought a second hand TRS-80 back in '83. I loved DOS but thought it could have been taken further. In the late 90's I was one of Microsoft's biggest fans, but dear old Bill retired in 2001 and it turns out the rest of the board are complete arseholes that couldn't give a rat's fart for their customers as long as the money keeps rolling in. This is when I started playing with different Linuxes. These days I still run a couple of Windows's for playing games but they are completely isolated systems. I never give Windows drivers for Lan or Wireless, saves so much heartache and pain and Windows is actually stable as long as it can't find what it thinks is an update. Runs a lot quicker without virus protection too. Still impossibly slow compared to Fedora with an early version of Gnome 3 though. Later versions of Gnome3 are worse than Windows. My educational background - I didn't even finish high school but I had a genuine interest in computers, like any puzzle, I just wanted to know how they worked and ripping the case open wasn't very helpful at first. My community - There are many service providers in Australia catering to about 85% of the population, but in rural Australia there is only one service provider. Optus, Dodo, iPrimus, Vodaphone and the rest cover less than 15% of Australia's land mass, the one unmentionable provider knows it has us over a barrel. It can charge what it likes, ignore complaints and fail to service infrastructure and there is nothing we can do about it. Just to add insult to injury, if we get someone old to phone them and complain and mention the legal obligations of a sole service provider and communications - "I'm old and I'm sick and I need to send my blood test results to the doctor" etc. then we all get reliable high speed access for a few hours before they throttle it back again. And we pay through the nose for this type of service. Under normal service conditions we can get speeds of up to 1800 Kbps but this is rare, normal speeds you would expect are around 40 Kbps. So an unadulterated install of Fedora means that every time you turn the computer on your internet access is bogged down by PackageKit and you can't browse the net or send emails until it has finished 40 minutes later. Then there's a few people running several computers, collectively PackageKit is costing them about $1 a day each even when they've just done updates, and they've got no internet access for 40 minutes. Some have rightly mentioned that except for the virus problems they were better off with Windows. Then take in to consideration that the most popular accounting software package in Australia, the one supported by our taxation department, is Windows only. Even Mac users have to install Wine for that one. This internet access is costing us a fortune and worse, the programmers and developers aren't seeing any of that money, it all goes to a modern day pirate. There's about 80 people running Linux in my community now, they all hated Win8 enough to try something different. Most are Fedora but I've done a few Ubuntu's as well depending on the person's needs, knowledge and skills, that would be about $1200 a month just for PackageKit going to the service provider if I didn't cripple it just after install. Please sort out this firewall issue, I'm sure that it won't just be my community that is grateful. Cheers, Andrew.