What to do with ridiculously fast Internet?
April 1, 2015 6:23 AM Subscribe
Gigabit Internet has come to where I live. For the first time in a long time, I finally have an upload of more than 10Mbps and no data transfer cap. What are some ideas to actually do with it?
I know this is a "problem" lots of people would like to have and I'm definitely not complaining. :) I'm trying to find clever ideas for what to do with 1,000Mbps in each direction. My backups are already hosted "in the cloud" and my Plex server is fully-equipped for streaming to any number of my mobile devices. Streaming is already a thing in my house with multiple Rokus and TiVos online. Any other suggestions? I have at least one spare, reasonably powerful computer that can sit in a corner and do whatever, plus I have a handful of static, public IPv4 addresses.
Internet geeks with lots of bandwidth, give me your suggestions.
I know this is a "problem" lots of people would like to have and I'm definitely not complaining. :) I'm trying to find clever ideas for what to do with 1,000Mbps in each direction. My backups are already hosted "in the cloud" and my Plex server is fully-equipped for streaming to any number of my mobile devices. Streaming is already a thing in my house with multiple Rokus and TiVos online. Any other suggestions? I have at least one spare, reasonably powerful computer that can sit in a corner and do whatever, plus I have a handful of static, public IPv4 addresses.
Internet geeks with lots of bandwidth, give me your suggestions.
Although I think that eventually we'll go back to being able to host our websites at home, I'd step into that carefully: It's nice to have other people watching for and managing DDOS attacks. I have a static IP and a home server, and I pay $10 a month to put the blog elsewhere just in case China takes a hatin' to my thoughts...
(Or, as happened recently, some Korean search engine decides it needs to spider all 20k blog entries 7 different times in the course of a few minutes.)
But more private services: photo albums that you're not going to share with the whole world, media server, getting home surveillance video off-site so that the baddies are still identifiable even if they make off with your computing gear...
posted by straw at 6:41 AM on April 1, 2015 [2 favorites]
(Or, as happened recently, some Korean search engine decides it needs to spider all 20k blog entries 7 different times in the course of a few minutes.)
But more private services: photo albums that you're not going to share with the whole world, media server, getting home surveillance video off-site so that the baddies are still identifiable even if they make off with your computing gear...
posted by straw at 6:41 AM on April 1, 2015 [2 favorites]
Rent out bandwidth to those of us less fortunate in rural areas who can't get speeds faster than T1 and pay through the nose for residential T1 lines.
No, I'm serious. I would pay someone with a fast pipe a portion of their monthly fee if they'd run a wire out to my house and I could use it.
I can't get cable internet.
I can't get DSL.
I've heard nothing but bad things about satellite/Hughes Net from my neighbor and two other people in my area who have it.
Although I'm line-of-sight to two LTE cell towers and my phone gets five bars, I'd blow through the 5GB monthly cap in a heartbeat.
I have a residential T1 line and pay $330/mo for the privilege. Streaming video can be an issue. Working from home with remote desktop can be an issue.
posted by tckma at 6:46 AM on April 1, 2015 [1 favorite]
No, I'm serious. I would pay someone with a fast pipe a portion of their monthly fee if they'd run a wire out to my house and I could use it.
I can't get cable internet.
I can't get DSL.
I've heard nothing but bad things about satellite/Hughes Net from my neighbor and two other people in my area who have it.
Although I'm line-of-sight to two LTE cell towers and my phone gets five bars, I'd blow through the 5GB monthly cap in a heartbeat.
I have a residential T1 line and pay $330/mo for the privilege. Streaming video can be an issue. Working from home with remote desktop can be an issue.
posted by tckma at 6:46 AM on April 1, 2015 [1 favorite]
Buy the lifetime plexpass and selectively share your plex library with copyright-free home movies with friends&family. The extra computer will come in handy for the additional transcoding.
posted by Akeem at 6:57 AM on April 1, 2015
posted by Akeem at 6:57 AM on April 1, 2015
Seconding running a Tor relay and configuring it to not be an exit if you don't want to deal with legal issues.
posted by Bangaioh at 7:36 AM on April 1, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Bangaioh at 7:36 AM on April 1, 2015 [1 favorite]
The various @home projects? Folding@home, SETI@home, etc.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 7:52 AM on April 1, 2015
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 7:52 AM on April 1, 2015
You don't say if you're opposed, but...
Make some people on various torrent sites happy to have a seed with fast upload speeds?
posted by kuanes at 8:02 AM on April 1, 2015 [1 favorite]
Make some people on various torrent sites happy to have a seed with fast upload speeds?
posted by kuanes at 8:02 AM on April 1, 2015 [1 favorite]
Self-host some services.
Media sharing with F&F is one thing I'd do with it. The other is distributed backup. Setup a file share for your family. I'd much rather trust my brother with my tax files, even my holiday pictures, than Google or Apple or Dropbox.
Here's a LH article from last year on best-of-breed selfhosted services, to give you some ideas.
posted by bonehead at 8:40 AM on April 1, 2015
Media sharing with F&F is one thing I'd do with it. The other is distributed backup. Setup a file share for your family. I'd much rather trust my brother with my tax files, even my holiday pictures, than Google or Apple or Dropbox.
Here's a LH article from last year on best-of-breed selfhosted services, to give you some ideas.
posted by bonehead at 8:40 AM on April 1, 2015
You could help host Archive.org torrents, or other public, legal torrents.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:51 PM on April 1, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:51 PM on April 1, 2015 [2 favorites]
Simplest answer? Nothing. Just use it like you'd use any other internet connection. If you aren't paying business class pricing for gigabit speeds, treat it like living in South Korea or something. There is no reason you HAVE to do anything more than you would otherwise.
If you want to go fancy, set up a nice router, with a VPN, and put up some servers to just play around with (mail relay, reverse proxy, webserver, dns reflector, ftp, whatever). Get comfy playing with routing tables and building out all kinds of fun little self-hosted web apps or data aggregators. Maybe run some indexers or crawlers. Just don't expect it to be super reliable. It is a consumer service, after all.
Just remember that your ISP will be monitoring your traffic and building up patterns based on your usage. Don't go all TOR or torrent crazy or start a bitcoin farm. That kind of usage will attract attention very quickly, and not just from the ISP (think No Such Agency).
Enjoy your bandwidth.
posted by daq at 5:05 PM on April 1, 2015
If you want to go fancy, set up a nice router, with a VPN, and put up some servers to just play around with (mail relay, reverse proxy, webserver, dns reflector, ftp, whatever). Get comfy playing with routing tables and building out all kinds of fun little self-hosted web apps or data aggregators. Maybe run some indexers or crawlers. Just don't expect it to be super reliable. It is a consumer service, after all.
Just remember that your ISP will be monitoring your traffic and building up patterns based on your usage. Don't go all TOR or torrent crazy or start a bitcoin farm. That kind of usage will attract attention very quickly, and not just from the ISP (think No Such Agency).
Enjoy your bandwidth.
posted by daq at 5:05 PM on April 1, 2015
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posted by fireoyster at 6:25 AM on April 1, 2015