My husband and I are both 5 boxers and enjoy dual 5-boxing 10 man raids so we often have all 10 of our characters on at once. Right now we are on 7Mbps DSL but we are planning to move and the area we are moving to only offers 1.5Mbps DSL. Yesterday in Naxx I ran a bandwidth monitor to see what my personal usage looked like and in combat I averaged 500kbps to 600kbps but there were rare spikes of 800kbps to 1.5Mbps! Still, it would seem that we don't come close to using our currect connection. The thing is, my husband says that when I login my 5 he notices some lag on his team so there must be more to our network performance than just the 7Mbps DSL. There is the possibility of bringing in a second line and giving each team a separate internet connection but the phone company wants a silly price for that.

I guess I have five questions: 1) Does anyone have any experience running 10 characters on a 1.5Mbps connection; 2) What might cause my team to interfere with my husbands team if we're only using a fraction of our current connection; 3) If we max out our connection are we likely to just lag, or will we be more likely to disconnect all together?; 4) Were the extreme spikes that I saw on the monitor likely caused by WoW or might my computer have been up to something else (checking for updates maybe) meaning that I can perhaps shut down some services to save bandwidth?; 5) Do addons increase bandwidth usage (so if we cut down on the mods we can get away with less internet)?

Thanks for any input. I don't want to have to find a new hobby! ;(