In general, Western Broadband does not block its subscribers from accessing any sites on the internet, with the following exceptions:

• Dynamic Security Protections: Western Broadband, in order to maintain a high quality-of-service for its subscribers, utilizes automated scripts to mitigate or eliminate the effect of certain kinds of attacks. These scripts normally are only triggered when a remote site attempts to attack one of our IP addresses, and this temporarily blocks all traffic from the attacker's IP address from communicating with the WB IP address they were attacking.
• Homeland Security Alerts: Western Broadband receives bulletins from the Department of Homeland Security's National Cyber Awareness System, and when we feel the security of our network would be best served by blocking IP addresses listed in these bulletins, we will do so.
• Crowd-sourced Automatic Security Protections: For similar reasons, we also utilize the hard work of other network security professionals who keep track of internet security threats and block those sites covered by certain specific blacklists, such as malc0de, DShield, and Spamhaus.
• General Security Measures: When we become aware of a specific security threat, such as a phishing scheme, aimed at our subscribers, we may put a block on the specific IP address used by the criminals in order to prevent our subscribers from inadvertently passing along sensitive data to people with nefarious goals.
• Copyright Infringement: As recent Federal Court cases have established, ISPs can be held financially liable for the copyright infringement activities of its subscribers if they do not follow a policy to handle the notices they receive from copyright holders and take steps to stop the infinging activity. Our policy in dealing with these matters is to try to communicate with our subscribers who have been engaged in infringing activity to get them to cease-and-desist on their own, but after the third such incident, we block those specific subscribers from utilizing the BitTorrent protocol to engage in any further infringing activity, as that is a less drastic measure than terminating their service.

The Restoring Internet Freedom Order defines throttling as "Any practice, other than reasonable network management elsewhere disclosed, that degrades or impairs access to lawful internet traffic on the basis of content, application, service, user, or use of a non-harmful device". Western Broadband does not practice any throttling whatsoever. Some of our subscribers have access to a limited "burst mode" which gives additional throughput, beyond the bandwidth to which they are subscribed, for a short durations of time, and any performance drop when that limited burst runs out may sometimes be perceived as throttling, but as the total amount of bandwidth supplied is not restricted below the level to which they are subscribed, that is not actually throttling.

The Restoring Internet Freedom Order defines Affiliated Prioritization as "Any practice that directly or indirectly favors some traffic over other traffic, including through use of techniques such as traffic shaping, prioritization, or resource reservation, to benefit an affiliate of an ISP, including identification of the affiliate." At this time, Western Broadband does not practice any Affiliated Prioritization whatsoever.

The Restoring Internet Freedom Order defines Paid Prioritization as "Any practice that directly or indirectly favors some traffic over other traffic, including through use of techniques such as traffic shaping, prioritization, or resource reservation, in exchange for consideration, monetary or otherwise." At this time, Western Broadband does not practice any Paid Prioritization whatsoever.

Western Broadband, in order to increase overall subscriber satisfaction, uses congestion management tools which attempt to limit certain types of traffic to a level below where the particular subscriber's traffic would become completely saturated. These types of traffic usually include, but are not limited to, OS updates, certain videogame downloads, BitTorrent transfers, and some cloud-based storage systems. The specific congestion-limiting rules vary a bit based on the subscriber's specific plan, but typically allow those types of traffic to use no more than 80% of the total available bandwidth, in order to allow other devices in the home or business to still have a bit of bandwidth to do other tasks on the internet. These congestion management rules can be suspended upon specific request, although we strongly advise against that.

As mentioned in the Congestion Management explanation, Western Broadband practices a rate control policy on BitTorrent traffic. For security reasons, we also block incoming traffic using ports associated with SSH, Telnet, SMTP, Winbox, LDAP, memcached and TR-069 protocols, and outgoing SMTP traffic over port 25 as these have been used in various attack vectors. If a subscriber has a need to lift any or all of these blocks, it can be done upon request.

This section refers to "Any restrictions on the types of devices and any approval procedures for devices to connect to the network." Western Broadband does not impose any restrictions on which devices may connect to the network, and there are no approval procedures required for any devices. Some devices may have their own requirements which could make them not well-suited for our network, and there may be, in certain circumstances, some services which may require us to be notified of a router change in order to make sure the new router has access to all the same services as the previous router had.

This section refers to "Any practices used to ensure end-user security or security of the network, including types of triggering conditions that cause a mechanism to be invoked (but excluding information that could reasonably be used to circumvent network security)." Western Broadband uses mechanisms listed under the "Blocking" and "Application-Specific Behavior" sections above to protect the security of our network. In addition, we implement a system of Firewalls and Network Address translation which, under normal circumstances, isolates almost all our subscribers from incoming security threats (however, this cannot protect against security threats initiated by equipment at the subscriber's site). We screen nearly all email messages coming into or going out of our email servers through an appliance which checks for viruses, and which tries to block or quarantine all spam and/or phishing messages, but it is not 100% effective.

This section requests "A general description of the service, including the service technology, expected and actual access speed and latency, and the suitability of the service for real-time applications."

• Western Broadband uses line-of-sight microwave transmission technology to provide internet bandwidth to nearly all of our subscribers. There are several different frequency bands in which we operate, with many different types of equipment, both current and legacy, used to connect our subscribers to our network of towers. Speeds will differ, based on hardware used, the bandwidth plan subscribed to, and the specific weather conditions.
• Bandwidth plans for new subscribers start at 3.0 megabits per second down and 0.5 megabits per second up, and go up from there. The typical top-end connection we can provide is 15.0 megabits per second down and 1.5 megabits per second up, but we may be able to offer higher speed than that, under certain circumstances.
• The nature of wireless internet connections using unlicensed frequencies makes it hard to precisely predict latency figures, but under normal circumstances, we mostly see round-trip ping times from subscriber sites to the internet and back of less than 100 ms, and typically less than 60ms.
• Our subscribers are typically able to use our service for quite a wide variety of applications, such as general web browsing and email, social media, streaming audio or video, some online gaming, VoIP telephony, working from home via a VPN or RDP, and cloud backup/storage as well as certain specialized activity which may require additional speed or specialized services to implement, such as transmitting security camera footage, video chat, or certain types of online gaming.

This section requests "If applicable, what non-broadband Internet access service data services, if any, are offered to end users, and whether and how any non-broadband Internet access service data services may affect the last-mile capacity available for, and the performance of, broadband Internet access service?" At this time, Western Broadband does not offer any services which would fall under this description.

Because Western Broadband uses several different line-of-sight microwave technologies, we prefer to be able to verify that a location looks possible to be serviced, and with what specific equipment, before we discuss specific prices and details for the plans available. Please contact us for further details, including a price list. In general, internet service prices start at $49.95 per month and go up from there. We require a one-year contract for new installations, and there is a setup fee which is due along with the first month's service at the time of install. The contract includes a clause setting the Early Termination Fee to either $200 or the remainder of the contractual obligation, whichever is less. Our contract also includes a clause about usage-based billing with an included monthly allotment of 250GB, but we are not enforcing that specific clause at this time, although we do reserve the right to contact subscribers who exceed that limit if their usage level is high enough to impact other subscribers.

As part of our standard network management practices, our Procera system collects some detailed information about each subscriber's network usage. This data is only utilized to troubleshoot problems or improve performance. This detailed data is not separately stored, and we do not share this data with any third-party. We also capture more generic total usage data from our subscribers on a periodic basis and use that to generate the graphs which are viewable by our support team, including our after-hours support team, and by the subscribers themselves when they've logged into our Customer Portal, also for the purpose of troubleshooting problems or improving performance. At this time, we do not use any of this data for any other purposes, nor is any of this data shared with any other third-party.

Our redress policy is pretty straightforward. Questions and complaints should be directed to our support team, either by telephone at (512)257-1077 or by email to support@ecpi.com. If the problems are not solvable by our Tier 1 support, they will be escalated to our Tier 2 support, and if necessary, then to management. We make every effort to be responsive to the best of our ability at each level of support.

Of course, if you have any questions about the information presented here, please either email us at support@ecpi.com or call us at (512)257-1077!