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CenterFuse Broadband Feasibility Report with business owners during the more in-depth interviews. Through this feedback we found the following problems with residential broadband that have implications for the business community: 1. Residential broadband has improved in recent years. Respondents almost universally said that broadband is better today than it was just a few years ago. We've been told that there used to be regular broadband outages that sometimes lasted for days. The improvements are likely due to the fact that Charter upgraded the technology that operates its network and Consolidated seems to be more conscientious than was FairPoint. There are still complaints about consistency, including that broadband speeds vary for both ISPs during the day. However, consumers said outages are rarer than in the recent past. 2. Problems connecting to school and offices from home. The survey and speed tests uncovered one troubling aspect of Ellensburg's residential broadband. More than one-third of respondents to the survey told us that the home Internet connection is not adequate to work or do schoolwork. We also heard during the interviews with businesses that many employees were having trouble reliably connecting to the office from home. Businesses foresee this as a permanent problem since many of the businesses would like to continue to allow people to work from home, at least parttime, after the end of the pandemic. 3. Delivery speeds of Charter's network are inconsistent. Charter advertises that the speed for basic broadband is 100 Mbps download. The speed tests showed that some customers are getting speeds of around 115 Mbps for the basic broadband product. However, Charter is not delivering uniform broadband speeds throughout the city. We were surprised at the results of the speed tests which showed that 55% of customers are getting speeds under 100 Mbps—a higher percentage than expected. This is a sign that the Charter network has some physical limitations. Possible reasons that Charter speeds are often slower than advertised might include issues such as: • The Charter network configuration has not been fully modernized, • Some neighborhood nodes contain too many households, • There is inadequate backhaul between neighborhood nodes and the Charter core electronics, • There are cascaded configurations in which nodes are interconnected rather than having dedicated fiber connection to each node. Speed tests will always uncover some homes that get slow speeds due to issues like having an outdated WiFi router—but generally this doesn't impact more than a few percent of customers in a market. Customer issues alone can't explain the large percentage of the Charter customers that seem to be receiving slower-than-expected broadband speeds. Charter upload speeds are also slow, with 71% of Charter customers having upload speeds under 15 Mbps. 4. High reliance on DSL. The performance of Consolidated DSL matters because the survey showed that 35% of residents are still buying broadband from the company. That's a higher percentage using DSL than what we see in most other markets. This probably says more about how residents feel about Charter than it does about Consolidated. The download speeds on Consolidated DSL were mostly under 20 Mbps, with some customers seeing speeds under 10 Mbps and even 5 Mbps. This shows that Page 6