the service I subscribe to has a contention ratio of 20:1, so the problem shouldn't be traffic through my ISP.
Not necessarily, 20:1 is normally given to a business package and your average business are infact generally using more bandwidth than a home user on a 50:1 contention, therefore you would actually come off worse.
In other words, your 50 home users are very rarely going to be utilising a connection 24/7, a business how would generally ALL be online simultaneously.
Yeah, but I'm mostly on line in the evening & @ w/es, so I'm not competing for bandwidth with business users (in this country at least).
