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CenterFuse Broadband Feasibility Report The FCC has historically set a definition of broadband. In 2015, the FCC established the definition of broadband as 25/3 Mbps (that's 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload). Prior to 2015 the definition of broadband was 4/1 Mbps, set a decade earlier. The FCC defines broadband in order to meet a legal requirement. Congress established a requirement for the FCC in Section 706 of the FCC governing rules that the agency must annually evaluate broadband availability in the country. Further, the FCC must take action if broadband is not being deployed in a timely manner. The FCC report the state of broadband to Congress every year.2 In these reports the FCC compiles data about broadband speeds and availability and proffers an opinion on the state of broadband in the country. In every report to date, the FCC has acknowledged that there are broadband gaps of various kinds, but the FCC has never determined that the problems are so bad that they need to take extraordinary measures to close any broadband gaps. The FCC didn't use empirical evidence like speed tests in setting the definition of broadband in 2015. They instead conducted what is best described as a thought experiment. They listed the sorts of functions that a"typical" family of four was likely to engage in, and then determined that a 25/3 Mbps broadband connection was fast enough to satisfy the broadband needs of a typical family of four. The FCC asked again in 2018 if 25/3 Mbps is an adequate definition of broadband. They concluded that 25/3 Mbps is still an adequate definition of broadband. There were numerous filings made in that docket that argued that the definition of broadband should be increased. The regulatory definition of broadband only matters because it defines what is and is not broadband. From a regulatory perspective, since everybody in Ellensburg can buy broadband faster than 25/3 Mbps, the community is considered as served by federal and state regulators. That matters because grant funding is only currently being made available to places that are deemed by regulators to not have adequate broadband. The Upload Speed Crisis The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a new broadband problem that was never much discussed before. Many homes that thought they had good broadband found that they were unable to function when multiple people in the home tried to simultaneously connect to work or school servers. We know that this is a problem in Ellensburg because we heard directly from people in the survey who had problems working and doing schooling from home during the pandemic. About one-third of those who tried to do work or school from home reported that their broadband was not adequate. Perhaps the easiest way to describe the problem is with a real-life anecdote. I have a colleague who was sent home to work along with her husband and two teenagers. The two adults are trying to work from home and the two kids are supposed to be online keeping up with schoolwork. The family has a broadband connection from a cable company with a download speed over 100 Mbps, but an upload speed that hovers around 10 Mbps. On top of their normal broadband usage, the family suddenly had to make a lot of new connections. Each of them needs to create a VPN to connect to their 2 The FCC report to Congress for 2020 are found in at https://docs.fcc.gov/publicattachtnents/FCC-20-50A1.pdf and https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-20-50A2.pdf Page 36