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CenterFuse Broadband Feasibility Report Historical Problems with Broadband. We heard that broadband has improved significantly in the last few years. There was almost universal condemnation of FairPoint as an ISP, the incumbent telephone provider before Consolidated. We also heard that Charter has gotten faster, but there is still a consistency issue with Charter -there are still routine outages, from a few minutes to a few days and that broadband speeds can vary widely during the day. But we heard that even Charter is better than they were a few years ago. Consolidated Fiber is a Huge Improvement over FairPoint. We heard repeatedly that Consolidated is a major improvement, particularly for the business community. Consolidated is willing and has already built fiber to reach a lot of downtown businesses. Consolidated technical assistance is reported to be much better than FairPoint, and problems get addressed and solved quickly, including in the evenings and on weekends. Businesses Don't See the City as a True ISP. The city sells fiber connectivity under the brand name of City Fiber We had half a dozen businesses tell us that they don't view City Fiber as a true ISP option for providing service. To some extent this is true. The city will bring fiber to businesses near to the city network, but the city stops at the electronics that bring fiber into the building. The city will not help businesses extend fiber beyond the entrance facility. To quote the City Fiber web site, "Due to liability issues, our installers cannot handle your router. . . You will need to provide your own router, WiFi, and Firewall in order to connect all of your devices." City Fiber also doesn't provide the level of customer care that many businesses require. As an example, City Fiber does not make customer repairs outside of normal business hours. We had several businesses tell us that they would consider using City Fiber but felt constrained from doing so due to this policy. Businesses that operate on the weekends can't take the risk of being out of service. Many Businesses Are Buying Two Broadband Connections. We found that a majority of the businesses that we talked to are buying at least two broadband connections from different ISPs. We always find a few businesses in every market that buy multiple connections. For example, paying for two broadband connections makes sense for any entity for which fiber is mission critical. Hospitals would be expected to have connections to multiple ISPs. Manufacturers that need the cloud to work would want multiple ISP feeds. But in our experience in other markets, having two connections is somewhat rare, and certainly not something that we would expect to see from retail establishments and other businesses for which broadband is not critical. From our conversations with businesses, we gleaned that this practice is a holdover from a time in the past. Go back five years and both Charter and FairPoint had regular broadband outages that often lasted for days. We've been told that there are still outages on Charter and performance problems with Consolidated DSL. But the businesses that buy fiber from Consolidated or City Fiber tell us that the services are solid and that there few or no outages in recent years (other than for unforeseen events like when a truck knocked down a utility pole). Over time that the businesses will learn to trust the ISPs providing service on fiber and that over time businesses will abandon the second Internet connection. But this is going to require time for businesses to erase the memory of the pain that used to be caused by broadband outages. Page 18