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CenterFuse Broadband Feasibility Report Before the pandemic, this family thought they had good broadband. They never had a problem before the pandemic, except for a few times when the teenagers were running multiple games in the cloud at the same time. But suddenly, the broadband connection was not adequate, and the family looked around for alternatives. Unfortunately, there was no broadband product available for their home that has faster upload capacity than the cable company. The nearest analogy to this situation harkens back to traditional landline service. We all remember times, like after 911, when you couldn't make a phone call because all the circuits were busy. That's what's happening with the increased use of VPN connections to school and work servers. Once the upload path from a neighborhood is full of VPNs, nobody else is in the neighborhood can grab a VPN connection until somebody "hangs up." What Does the FCC Say About Upload Bandwidth? In August of 2020, the FCC adopted its Sixteenth Broadband Deployment Report Notice of Inquiry4 that is used to report the state of broadband to Congress. On the opening page of that document the FCC makes the extraordinary statement that 85% of the home in the US can buy broadband with speeds of 250/25 Mbps. The FCC makes this claim based upon the data provided to it by the country's ISPs on Form 477. We know the data reported by the ISPs is badly flawed in overreporting download speeds, but we've paid little attention to the second number the FCC cites—the 25 Mbps upload speeds that are supposedly available to everybody. In my professional experience having conducted over 400 broadband studies and having worked in even more hundreds of communities, the FCC claim that 85% of homes have access to 25 Mbps upload speeds is massively overstated. The FCC acknowledges this and is currently undertaking a complete overhaul of the broadband data reporting system. The vast majority of the customers covered by the FCC statement are served by cable companies using hybrid fiber-coaxial technology. I don't believe that cable companies are widely delivering upload speeds greater than 25 Mbps. I think the FCC has the story partly right. I think cable companies tell customers that the broadband products they buy have upload speeds of 25 Mbps, and the cable company's largely report the marketing speeds on Form 477. But do cable companies really deliver 25 Mbps upload speeds? We saw in Ellensburg that most Charter customers do not see upload speeds greater than 20 Mbps. It's fairly easy to understand the upload speed capacity of a cable system. The first thing to understand is the upload capacity based upon the way the technology is deployed. Most cable systems deploy upload broadband using the frequencies on the cable system between 5 MHz and 42 MHz. This is a relatively small amount of bandwidth and it also sits at the noisiest part of cable TV frequency. I remember back to the days of analog broadcast TV and analog cable systems when somebody running a blender or a microwave would disrupt the signals on channels 2 through 5—the cable companies are now using these same frequencies for upload broadband. The DOCSIS 3.0 specification assigned upload broadband to the worst part of the spectrum because before the pandemic almost nobody cared about upload broadband speeds. 4 https://does.fcc.gov/publiciattachments/FCC-20-1 I2AI.pdf Page 39