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CenterFuse Broadband Feasibility Report have been able to use DOCSIS 3.1 to increase the speed of the fastest product to speeds up to a gigabit. In Ellensburg, it looks like the fastest product is at a speed a little under a gigabit. One limitation of a DOCSIS network is that the standard does not allow for symmetrical data speeds, meaning that download speeds are generally much faster than the upload speeds. This is an inherent design characteristic of DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1 where no more than 1/8 of the bandwidth can be used for upload. But even with that 1/8 allowance, most cable companies are assigning less bandwidth to upload speeds—because the public has always clamored for faster download speeds. Earlier in the report was a lengthy discussion about the upgrade speed crisis that has arisen during the pandemic. The cable companies are likely hoping that issue will diminish in importance at the end of the pandemic, but they are going to have to eventually deal with upload speeds. CableLabs has developed an upgrade being called DOCSIS 4.0 that will allow for symmetrical gigabit data speeds. This will require even more empty channel slots on a cable network and the new standard assumes that cable company will increase total system bandwidth of the network to at least 1.2 GHz of bandwidth. The gear needed to upgrade to DOCSIS 4.0 won't hit the market for at least two or three years. Most of the big cable companies have already said they are not interested in upgrading immediately to the new standards since the upgrades are expensive. Charter has publicly speculated that they would likely upgrade to fiber rather than pour money into another major upgrade of the copper network. Condition of the Network. Local condition of the coaxial copper network can have a big influence on the quality of broadband. It's not unusual for the quality of the network to vary by neighborhood, meaning the quality of broadband is not usually the same everywhere in a city. The coaxial copper wires in the Charter network are aging, similar to the telephone copper wires. The coaxial network in Ellensburg was likely built in the 1970s. Coaxial cable networks exhibit signs of aging sooner than telephone copper networks because the thicker coaxial wires act like a huge antenna, and older networks attract so much interference and noise that it become harder to transmit the signals through the wires. In an HFC network all of the customers in a given neighborhood share the broadband. This means that the numbers of customers sharing a neighborhood node is a significant factor-the fewer the customers, the stronger and more reliable the broadband signal. Before cable systems offered broadband, they often had over 1,000 customers on a node. But today, the sizes of the nodes have been "split"by building fibers deeper into neighborhoods so that fewer homes share the data pipe for a given neighborhood. The architecture of using neighborhood nodes is what has given cable companies the reputation that data speeds slow down during peak usage times, like evenings. However, if nodes are made small enough, then this slowdown doesn't have to occur. There is also a distance limitation on coaxial cable. Unamplified signals are not generally transmitted more than about 2.5 miles over a coaxial network from a network node. Amplifiers are needed to boost the signal strength for coaxial distribution over a few thousand feet. Modern cable companies try to limit the number of amplifiers on a coaxial route to five or less since adding amplifiers generally reduces broadband speeds. Page 71