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CenterFuse Broadband Feasibility Report We now have feedback on the products on StarLink. The company is offering download speeds of between 50 Mbps and 150 Mbps for$99 per month. For now, this requires a$500 connection fee for a customer. D. Benefits of Fiber Broadband This section of the report takes a high-level look at the benefits of fiber broadband for a community. Community Benefits from a Fiber Network Choice. Customer choice is going to become a significant issue in the coming decade. Charter's residential broadband is significantly faster than the DSL provided by Consolidated, and over time we would expect Charter to win most of the customers in Ellensburg. This means that eventually Charter will become a de facto monopoly if there is no alternative to its broadband products. No city wants to have only one ISP. It's well-documented how monopoly power injures communities. Monopoly ISPs feel free to raise rates. They don't have any competition forcing them to provide good customer service. Monopoly providers can be slow with repairs because customers have no alternative. Price Competition. We know that overall prices are lower in markets that have multiple fast broadband networks. A fiber network in the community would mean a major new competitor to Charter and help to keep prices in check. One only has to compare broadband products in prices in places where Google Fiber or a municipality has built a fiber network to see that it makes a difference in prices and customer service. Cable companies like Charter generally compete through the use of advertised specials, meaning lower prices for new customers. If Charter feels like a monopoly it might not offer any incentives for customers to stay on the network. Price competition is going to be even more important as Charter and other cable companies continue to raise broadband rates. Charter has raised the price of standalone broadband by $5 per month for two years in a row. It's likely that within a decade that Charter broadband rate for basic residential service will be $100 pr more if unchecked by competition. Upload Broadband Speeds. This issue was described in detail in the broadband GAP analysis. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a problem with the broadband in Ellensburg and in much of the rest of urban America. We know there are households in the city that are struggling to work from home during the pandemic, and there is no real incentive for Charter to improve upload speeds. High quality upload data paths are required to connect to office or school networks. Good upload speeds are needed to connect to Zoom and similar video chat applications. Good upload speeds are also needed for telemedicine in visiting with doctors from home. Good upload speeds are also now needed for many gaming applications when the biggest game companies moved games to the cloud over the past few years. Fiber networks can provide symmetrical uploads data speeds that can easily handle the new demands for upload bandwidth. There is a lot of consensus among industry experts that a lot of the uses we've found for upload broadband are not going to go away when the pandemic is over. Many companies now Page 81