[1] My first broadband connection was in 1998 at 768/768 kbit symmetrical. My first megabit speed connection was in 2006 or 2007. in 2010 or 2011 we got VDSL and it was 16 whole megabits. Now i have 300mbit on a good day, and 150mbit on a bad day.
I literally wrote the guide on how to use old hardware with VM tech to route your house, first with ipcop[2], then generically[3], and just this week i wrote a guide on how to get ipv6 working with starlink and dd-wrt[4].
i've been in this a long time.
[2]https://web.archive.org/web/20220323223325/https://www.dslre...
[3]https://web.archive.org/web/20131214075417/https://www.dslre...
and the dd-wrt starlink one from this week:
[4]https://nextcloud.projectftm.com/index.php/s/4iScqZbrfYiNcKy
ETA: it is hilarious how much pushback i got about doing all of this in a VM, just scant years before "you should just use a VM for that" became the default answer, and a decade before "just put it in a k8s cluster and pay someone a quarter million a year to babysit it" became a thing...
also ipcop booted and installed off a single floppy forever