Flow control mechanisms avoid or eliminate retries of transactions in a coherency interconnect. The terminal includes a demodulator operative to receive and demodulate a modulated signal to provide a transport stream, and a transport demultiplexer coupled to the demodulator and operative to receive and process the transport stream to provide a sequence of transport packets re-timestamped to synchronize encoded realtime content and encoded non-realtime content included therein. This embodiment can be placed in residential housing in rooms such as dens, family rooms, or living rooms. The front bridge with its head-guard and the back bridge with its head-guard define a planar passage way between the bridges.