No, I would have run out of codespace on the 16F876 and would have had to go to an 18 series which for various reasons I did not wish to do. Instead I interfaced to a Lantronix module.

TCP/IP software for the PICs is available free of charge on request from Microchip. Details on their website. Whatever you can do in Assembler, you can pretty much do in PBP. You can also happily mix both.

As for 32-bit vars, ready canned routines are available to handle variables greater than 16-bits. Look for them - or create your own.