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CenterFuse Broadband Feasibility Report The download speeds in this table get really large if extended even further into the future. If the demand for broadband download speed continues to grow at 21% annually, then the need in 2030 would be 438 Mbps, in 2035 would be 1.1 Gbps, and in 2040 would be 2.9 Gbps. It's easy to say that such future speeds are not possible, but recall that just 20 years ago, a 1 Mbps DSL connection was considered a blazingly fast broadband connection. A fiber network will be able to keep up with this kind of future demand. There is already fiber gear today that can deliver 10 Gbps broadband to residential customers. It's possible that the cable company networks could also keep up with this demand, but it would require several major upgrades in technology to do so. The Charter network in Ellensburg can deliver download speeds up to a gigabit today. However, the secret that Charter and other cable companies don't want to talk about is that they can't give that much speed to everybody unless they build a lot more fiber and greatly reduce node sizes. Charter would need to upgrade to DOCSIS 4.0 to get speeds faster than 1 gigabit. It's not hard to put this prediction into perspective. Cable companies that serve around 65% of all broadband customers in the country already advertise minimum speeds today of between 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps. That speeds vary by market due to the condition of local coaxial networks like we see in Ellensburg. But in markets where the coaxial cable in in good condition, big cable companies already provide 200 Mbps broadband today as the target speed for their introductory broadband product. It's not hard to imagine that seven years from now that the national definition of broadband ought to be around 250 Mbps. That doesn't mean that the FCC will continue to increase the regulatory definition. Last year they rejected numerous filing asking them to increase the 25/3 Mbps definition. There is a political downside if the FCC increases the definition of broadband—it would reclassify numerous homes as not having broadband. Today the 25/3 Mbps definition of broadband is lower than the reality of what many homes need, but my guess is that there will have to be an even bigger difference before an FCC will react and change the definition. One of the conclusions that can be reached by this analysis is that any new network built today ought to be capable of meeting the expected broadband speeds of the next decade. The only technologies capable of meeting the projected future needs for bandwidth are fiber-to-the-premise, cable company hybrid- fiber networks, and some wireless technologies using millimeter wave spectrum that are just now being trialed in a few markets. Cable companies are only going to able to provide speeds above 1 gigabit by implementing another round of expensive upgrades. There is a lot of speculation in the industry that cable companies would upgrade to fiber-to-the-home rather than make such an upgrade. Altice already is supposedly upgrading its properties to fiber. But they have fallen far behind their announced schedule and are concentrating first larger markets before upgrading secondary markets like Ellensburg. Page 53