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CenterFuse Broadband Feasibility Report for working at home and connecting to a work server, for connecting to online video meetings like Zoom, or for using telemedicine. Upload speeds are also now vital to a business that wants to connect to many employees working from home. Many residents in Ellensburg who thought they had adequate broadband suddenly found during the pandemic that they were unable to conduct multiple simultaneous upload connections at the same time. This phenomenon appeared all over the country as residences found out that slow upload speeds are a limiting factor for connecting from home. The upload speeds in Ellensburg can be described as sluggish. While many businesses can buy broadband on fiber, the upload speeds available for everybody else are not spectacular. For Charter, 22% of upload speeds are under 10 Mbps and 56%are under 15 Mbps. The upload speeds on Consolidated DSL are even slower with a majority of upload speeds under 1 Mbps. The upload crisis is so new that there are not yet any standards for what is acceptable. Broadband usage is additive and that problems arise in homes where more than one person wants to simultaneously connect to upload applications like working or schooling from home. It is likely that the industry will conclude that homes with two people working simultaneously are going to need at least 20 Mbps upload, and homes with more than two people working simultaneously might need 50 Mbps or more in upload speeds. The pandemic has highlighted an upload crisis for businesses as well. Businesses need a significant upload data path in order to allow multiple employees to connect from home at the same time. Just as with home broadband, a dedicated connection has to made from a business to each employee working at home, and it doesn't take a lot of connections at a business to overwhelm broadband provided by Consolidated or Charter. It's our conclusion that the upload speeds for businesses and residents in Ellensburg are often not adequate to handle the new upload demand. For example, a 10 Mbps upload path might not always be adequate to support even two people trying to use the upload stream at the same time. Unfortunately, the upload issue is so new that there are not yet any industry metrics to define an adequate upload path. We can see from both the advertised speeds and the speeds we saw on the tests, that the upload speeds in Ellensburg are often not adequate to support working and schooling from home. The Broadband Gap Is Growing. Compounding any existing problems with residential broadband, the demand for broadband is growing at an extraordinary rate. The following statistics are gathered and reported by OpenVault, a company that provides software for the large companies that operate the Internet backbone. These numbers include combined download and upload usage in gigabytes. What's a gigabyte (or GB)? Watching a typical movie uses up to 1.5 GB per hour. Email uses 100,000 pages per GB; Word documents use 65 pages per GB; spreadsheets use 166 pages per GB; Power Point Presentation 17,500 pages per GB. A basic smartphone can store about 30 GB of files, pictures and other "data." Open vault estimates the nationwide average amount of bandwidth used by a home each month as follows 1St Quarter 2018 215 Gigabytes 1St Quarter 2019 274 Gigabytes Page 9