Ah, the holidays. A time to slow down and reflect. To catch up with family over a table loaded with roast beast and who-hash. To relish bankrupting your uncle in Monopoly because one Christmas he gave your sisters 20 bucks each and nothing to you. (But let’s not get petty.)

Well, the 2020 edition is even better. Now we get to experience it all on the soft glow of a video screen instead of face to face. Yes, folks, the socially distanced holidays are here.

Speed has been an obsession of internet users as far back as the dial-up days of the internet stone age, when 56k modems still roamed the earth. And the quest for ever-faster internet speeds rages on in the fiber era.

Breaking news: Internet usage is going up.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone, thanks to the tablets, home security and other smart devices that gobble up the internet speed and bandwidth on our home WiFi networks.

Whether you’re a die-hard sports fan or a movie buff, the best streaming TV experience begins with a wide-open broadband internet connection. And that’s where traditional coaxial cable drops the ball.

Fiber internet’s ability to pipe speeds up to 940 Mbps into your home is unmatched anywhere, and it’s your ticket to streaming nirvana—especially if you have a symmetrical connection. That means the speed of downloading movies and music is about the same as the speed of uploading information for gaming.

It’s official: watching TV and movies is our favorite national distraction.

More than a quarter of entertainment hours in 2018 were spent watching television shows and movies. That’s as much time as we spent with music and video games combined. Reading books and other offline activities made up the remainder of the list.

"Ten minutes … "

This is the sound of school resuming at households around Mississippi this week as students return to the classroom — the virtual classroom, that is. Thousands of students across the state are joining their classmates virtually, relying on their home internet connection like never before.