Review by kshusker 
UPDATED: 47 days ago
member for 47 days, 34 visits, last login: 2 days ago
 Lawrence,Douglas,KS
 $120 per month
 about 1 days
 "Local company, fast download speeds"
 "Slow upload speeds, bandwidth caps, network congestion"
 "Good choice for casual internet users, poor choice for heavy users"
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We've had Sunflower's internet service since the beginning, in the late 1990s. We've used them for cable, telephone and internet (the internet portion of our bill is about $55)
The positives are that they are a a local company in Lawrence; when you call someone, you are talking to a local call center and they are generally very responsive.
The download speed of the service itself (we have used the top level, Gold) when network use is light is as good as advertised, a solid 20 mbit down (they are upgrading to DOCSIS 3.0 and 50 mbit down in November). However, in the evenings and during other periods of heavy use, the speed slows down, sometimes significantly.
Additionally, the upload speeds are terrible, only 1 mbit at the most expensive tier of service (even with the new DOCSIS 3.0 upgrade), which makes Sunflower useless for things like online backup, or uploading to video sites, etc.
Lots of people have complained about the low bandwidth caps, and I don't have much to add here. You basically always need to be cognizant of your cap (to Sunflowers credit they have a good monitoring system; you can view your use by the month, week, day and hour) and how much data you are using, kind of like in the old days with dial-up AOL, where you had so many minutes a month and the clock was always running.
I think Sunflower is a good choice if you are a light internet user, who just wants to do some surfing and email, but if you are a heavy user or someone who needs faster upload speed, you might want to see if U-Verse is available yet in your neighborhood.
I should note for the record Sunflower is starting to advertise an unlimited bandwidth service called Palladium, with variable speeds but no bandwidth limits. This might be something some folks would want to look in to, but I have no experience with it.
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Sunflower Broadband
