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CenterFuse Broadband Feasibility Report • There has also been a big explosion in the use of home video cameras. Sending cameras images outside of the home to cloud storage or to be viewed when people are away from home requires significant upload bandwidth. The simplistic way to quantify the bandwidth needs is to add up the various uses. For instance, if four people in a home each wanted to have a different Zoom conversation, the home would need a simultaneous connection of around 8 Mbps both up and down. But bandwidth usage in a house is not that simple, and a lot of other factors contribute to the quality of bandwidth connections within a home. Consider all of the following: • WiFi Collisions. WiFi networks can be extremely inefficient when multiple people are simultaneously trying to use the same WiFi channels. Today's version of WiFi only has a few channels to choose from, so multiple connections on the WiFi network interfere with each other. It's not unusual for the WiFi network to add a 20%to 30%overhead, meaning that collisions of WiFi signals effectively waste usable bandwidth. • Lack of Quality of Service(QoS). Home broadband connections don't provide quality of service, which means that homeowners are unable to prioritize data streams. QOS is a technology that might let a customer prioritize a connection like a school connection. This would mean that connection would get priority, to the detriment of all other connections at the home. Without QoS, insufficient bandwidth affects all broadband usage within a home. This is easily demonstrated if somebody in a home tries to upload a big data file while somebody else is using Zoom—the Zoom connection can suddenly not have enough bandwidth available and will either freeze or drop the connection—as millions of Zoom users experienced. With QoS applied to the Zoom call, that connection would keep using the needed bandwidth and it would take longer to upload the big file. • Shared Neighborhood Bandwidth. Unfortunately, a home using DSL or cable modem broadband doesn't only have to worry about how others in the home are using the bandwidth, because bandwidth is also shared with everybody else using the same ISP in their neighborhood. As the bandwidth demand for the whole neighborhood increases, the quality of the bandwidth available to every home degrades. It's possible for the bandwidth connection to a whole neighborhood to be maxed out—which results in the inability of anybody else to make an outgoing connection. • Physical Issues. ISPs don't want to talk about it, but events like drop wires swinging in the wind can affect a DSL or cable modem connection. Cable broadband networks are also susceptible to radio interference—your connection will get a little worse when somebody is operating a blender or microwave oven. • ISP Limitations. All bandwidth is not the same. For example, the upload bandwidth in a cable company network uses the worse spectrum inside the cable network—it uses the frequency that is most susceptible to interference. This never mattered in the past when customers cared only about download bandwidth, but an interference-laden 10 Mbps upload stream is not going to deliver a reliable 10 Mbps connection. The family in question quickly figured out that their bottleneck was upload speeds. They discovered that they could not all work at the same time—and so they had to take turns using the Internet for school or work. The problem was even more aggravating because they sometimes ran into problems even when only two of them were working at the same time. It appears that that the amount of upload bandwidth available to the home varies during the day, likely as the result of factors outside of the home. Page 38