The Future of Broadband Speeds, New Computer Talk, and Sexual Innuendo

I don’t really remember what drove me here, but at random I found myself doing a new speed test a little bit ago and it just kind of blows me away to think how far we’ve come…

Both in terms of just the last year when I first got FiOS installed at our previous house with speeds of 21 Mbps down and 13 Mbps up, and of course going back even farther to maybe circa 2000 (?)  when the idea of “broadband internet” was just coming to the small, forest glen that is Gaylord, MI with a whopping 1 Mbps down and what … maybe 384 kbps up!

I just checked and officially my package with Verizon is for 50/25, and yet for another five bucks a month, I can bump that up to 75/35! The plans beyond that are still kind of ridiculously expensive (+$50 for 150/65, +$120 for 300/65, and a whopping +$210 for 500/100).

Still, the fact that fifteen years after dial-up modems, you can now get a fiber cable running half a gigabit speeds into your home … pretty cool! 😉

In the past I’ve kinda been one to poo-poo these extra-high speeds just because I still contend that basic web surfing only needs a fraction of that – even if people are watching YouTube videos at the same time.

…though don’t even get me started on YouTube because somebody, whether it’s Verizon or Google or somebody in between, sure has a habit of making my video watching miserable despite this amazing pipe running into my house!

Anyways, it kinda makes me want to pay the $5/month to bump it up to 75 Mbps because, well, why not?! Do you have any idea how much porn a guy can download at 9 megabytes per second?! 

33 GIGABYTES AN HOUR, that’s how much…

Until 4K porn comes along and ups the resolution again, I can’t even watch 33 gigs of porn in an hour’s time.

Then again, I think I’m getting hard just talking about that download speed, so maybe I won’t need 33 gigs of porn…

Nobody needs 33 gigs of porn…

Channeling my inner-Dave Barry, wouldn’t 33 gigs of porn be a great name for a rock band?

ANYWAYS… WHERE WAS I???

Oh yeah, so I need a new computer.

Seeing those crazy download speeds, among other things, makes me kind of miss the days when I had a home server that gave me an excuse to download stuff from time to time. Unfortunately, that died sometime back in 2010 and I never did seem to find the money/time to rebirth it. Plus, the hard drive on my desktop has been big enough (600 GB) that since then I’ve really just saved everything that I download there instead … which maybe that’s the reason that it’s starting to get pretty darned clunky, too!

According to the Internet, apparently the last time I performed surgery on this machine was March 2009, and even that was only replacing the motherboard/processor/memory, so who knows how old this hard drive actually is! Thankfully it seems to be trucking along a bit more reliably than some of the older drives I’ve had did over the years … but I certainly don’t want to tempt fate any longer than I have to.

On a side note, it’s been so long since I’ve put together a computer that I was browsing on Newegg and I don’t even know what’s good anymore! Four years ago I thought that four cores and four gigs of RAM was pretty bitchin’ for a desktop PC … how many dozens of cores and terabytes of RAM are they cramming into these things now???

Once I do figure that out, I think what I want to do is this … instead of building my desktop PC and a home server PC separately, I want to buy a small server rack that I can put in my closet, then build two new machines and put them both in the rack, along with my router and all of this other junk around my desk that at this point really could go in the closet without me missing the clutter too much. I found a really well-executed example of somebody doing this and putting the rack in a corner with a lamp on it, so I think it could work and it would likely be a much better solution for my home server desires if I can put something together that’s properly cooled because I’m almost positive just cramming five or six hard drives into one case didn’t bode so well for their longevity or anything!

Still, it kinda makes me miss the setup I had in apartment #2 where I had a small, walk-in closet off of my office and was able to setup my own little server area in there by running all of the cables through the walls! Only difference now is that this time I own the walls, so if I feel like getting really crafty, I could probably even wire things up properly by putting power and cable jacks right there in the closet where the rack will be! 😯

I remember thinking before I actually owned my own house that when I did, I’d take the extra effort to run cat6 through the entire house and wire it for networking, whereas now I’ve got ethernet running from the router to my desktop a foot and a half away, and so far I’ve been quite content just letting wi-fi pick up the rest of the slack to keep me from having to clunk around upstairs in the attic… 😛

Anyways, so that’s my computer update for … a while! Will definitely share plans and pictures and whatnot if I can rustle up enough money to start on this little project. The rack alone is a couple of hundred bucks, and I haven’t really dug in to research prices but I’m sure between all-new components for both and going the extra mile with hard drive cooling for the server … it’s gonna be pricey.

But then again, with a broadband connection capable of sucking down nearly a terabyte of porn every day, I think it’s clear that a professional installation is required to properly house such a valuable personal archive!

…maybe I shouldn’t have used the phrase sucking down…

😀