[Vigilanteman]

Broadband capacity is very much like highway traffic: when you use it makes a great deal of difference. My daughter does most of her watching after 11 p.m. at night and seldom has any issues. The wife and I are to bed by then and have plenty of issues during the primetime viewing hours.

Sounds like WideOpenWest has great customer service. Are they a satellite service like Hughes or standard cable broadband?

Our only option here for standard cable broadband is Comcast and their service level is crappy.

[netmilsmom]

It’s a secondary cable company

http://www.wowway.com/aonline/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=wideopenwest&utm_campaign=Detroit%20-%20Brand&mkwid=eG3ffENQw&pcrid=750860471

[Melas]

Broadband capacity is very much like highway traffic: when you use it makes a great deal of difference.

That used to be true. Today a small minority of rural customers face that with underserved DSL, during peak hours. Outside of those rural areas, connections with staggering bandwidth between 20mbs and 100mbs are cheap, and the infrastructure is there to handle even the highest capacities of users online with no throttling. Hell, I just upgraded and got a new package with 150mbs down and 35mps up. I could conceivably stream VUDU's highest quality (the highest in the business) movies to 16 different televisions in the house, and still have enough bandwidth left over to FReep.

Or put another way: Even if so many users were on that I reduced to 5% capacity, I could still watch HD Netflix without a slowdown. Theoretical numbers aside, it's not unusual here to have 4 televisions streaming movies from the net, 2 computers playing online games and still 2 more computers surfing the net. All without a any slowdowns that are discernible to the users.