When we first got the service from Wildblue it seemed so great! But a few months later it started to slow drastically around certain times of day. Those times are when I need to use the internet of coarse.
 So when I called the tech support they went through a couple steps to discover what my problems were...Get this they made me tell them when I pressed go to load a page while they timed it over the phone on a stopwatch....Then I actually went to a site that tested my upload and download speeds. After coming to the conclusion that I indeed had massive slow downs they sent service people over. Who had checked all the gear and said it was fine.
 So they then told me that the problem was from large usage in my area...This is a convincing conclusion, but can they actually DO  anything about this? i have a year contract with these people and the service not what I expected. Any suggestions?
~THANKS IN ADVANCE~

If a company offers a shared service with download bit rates of up to (say) 2 Mbit/s it must sell the same service to enough people so that the total money received corresponds to the cost of providing the full time 2 Mbit/s capacity.

Low prices per customer imply low monthly average bit rates - it is a simple at that.   Fair access policies attempt to share out the capacity and, for example, may cause a period of fast downloading to be followed by a period of bandwith throttling to bring the average back to normal.

Search "Wildblue fair access policy" for more information.

Best regards, Eric.