A: No, it is not. The equipment we install at your site does resemble the equipment used for satellite TV and Internet providers, but our equipment is located on towers just a few miles from your home, not on a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, 22,300 miles above the Earth.

Here's why that matters:

• Latency: Latency refers to the amount of time it takes a data packet to go from you, to the internet, and back. Since the fastest any data can travel is the speed of light, and the connection from your home to our fiber connection can be up to 100 miles, that round trip is still much faster to travel than the path for satellite, which has to go from the earth, to the satellite, then out to the internet, then the return packet has to make the same trip in reverse. That means, even if the data center you were accessing was located at the site on Earth where the satellite signals go, it would still have a round trip of more than 89,000 miles! That's nearly a half-second at best, and that slowdown can have a huge effect on gaming, voice or video communications, and even the kind of VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) used by many who utilize the Internet to work from home.
• Weather: Satellite systems, because they communicate with a satellite in orbit, must send and receive data through every layer of the atmosphere. Of course, clouds, especially rain clouds, contain moisture, which can absorb the microwaves carrying the data. Actual rain and thunderstorms make it worse, and satellite systems can suffer weather-related disruptions under a variety of conditions. As our system uses terrestrial towers, the signal travels much closer to the ground the whole time, and is much less likely to be disrupted unless the storm is very severe.
• Capacity issues: The Internet is becoming more vital to people every day, and that means people are using it much more heavily than they ever had before. For a company like ours, increasing capacity means buying new equipment and sending a crew to a tower to climb the tower and install it. It does cost money, and it's work, to be sure, but it's not that difficult. When a satellite provider needs to add capacity, they would have to launch a new satellite into orbit, which costs hundreds of millions of dollars, so they don't do it often. Instead, they ration their limited bandwidth by giving a very restricted amount of usage during peak usage hours (6pm to 11pm), and they typically tolerate oversubscription ratios we (and our subscribers) would find shocking. If a satellite subscriber uses up their meager data allocation in the first few days of the month, then they are stuck with a very slow level of speed for quite a while, almost acting as a punitive measure.

A: We can certainly test your connection to see if the actual, raw speed has dropped, but in most cases, the speed drop is a subjective one. That is, the equipment and plan you are using are still moving the same number of bits per second they always were able to, but your household's demand for data has increased.

The last five years have seen an explosion in the number of devices in a typical home which connect to the Internet, as well as a vast increase in the amount of data those devices now use. The Internet was only recently primarily about web surfing, email, and the new-fangled social media networks for most people, but today, streaming video permeates the web (with motion ads), social media (Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Periscope, and others), and streaming video services (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, ad infinitum). That's not even considering the switch in 2015 from gaming consoles relying on physical media (DVD and Blu-Ray) to games which are essentially all downloaded over the internet, often with sizes of 10-40 GB. Wow! Don't forget the now-ubiquitous smartphones, because they are also big-time Internet users - phones often upload backups and photos to the cloud and download app updates and OS updates which can be massive, all going on in the background, so most people have no idea they are even taking place, even when they are using up all your internet bandwidth.

All this new cloud-based, online-presence, video-everywhere tech requires ever increasing levels of performance, and increasing your internet speed may be simple, or it may be a challenge.

A: In some cases, if you already have the latest hardware installed, it can be as simple as just changing the bandwidth plan you are subscribed to. That process starts with you contacting us, and can be completed in under 5 minutes. If you need a hardware upgrade to get to the speed plan you want, it becomes a very important question about lines-of sight.

Much of the speed improvements of the current generation hardware come from the higher frequency used and their improved modulation rates, but these factors also make the connection criteria more stringent, so a signal path which was marginal on old hardware, may be unable to get connected at all with the new equipment. To make matters even more complicated, connecting equipment with poor signal levels can degrade the performance of all the other subscribers connected to the Access Point, as well.

Assuming we can offer a hardware upgrade, the newer hardware offers better speeds, even at the lowest tiers of service. The higher-speed tiers of service do give a pretty good level of performance increase for the price.

A: Unlike cable or DSL internet, which provides wired service via buried underground copper or fiber optic cable directly to your neighborhood, our service is wireless. A system which operates over a cable can utilize a very large bandwidth, because the cable is completely isolated, whereas wireless equipment must use a much smaller chunk of the available wireless spectrum, because it has to share the airwaves. This limitation results in restrictions on the speed capabilities of the connection from the Access Point on the tower to the Subscriber Module at your site.

It's not all bad news - wireless equipment does have one big advantage over cabled systems, in that we do not need to lay cable for each and every customer. In big cities and planned communities, the population density is high enough for the big companies to justify running cable to every home in an area. In more rural areas, however, cable companies simply don't think it's worth the expense. Wireless ISPs, such as Western Broadband, can put up a tower in a single advantageous spot, and cover customers in an area up to 452 square miles in size, depending on terrain and tree coverage. By carefully picking tower locations, we are able to cover a very large percentage of Williamson County and substantial areas in Bell, Burnet, and Travis Counties, bringing the Internet to thousands of homes which are not served by the big cable and telephone companies.

A: That wasn't really a question, but we really are constantly working on it.

• We have implemented some fairly major infrastructure improvements which push the connection speeds between many of our towers to 1 Gbps.
• We've built several important redundant paths which help keep the network running smoothly even when raging storms are causing some inter-tower links to fail.
• We have increased the number of access points on our most heavily-subscribed towers, so that the system can handle the load, even at peak usage time.

But that's not all...

• We recently increased the capacity of our connections to the Internet with new, ultra high-speed fiber backbones.
• We recently deployed some brand-new technologies which allow us to significantly increase performance for our subscribers by upgrading certain equipment on the towers. This state-of-the-art gear is designed to not require a trip to each subscriber's home, so it permits us to get a lot of subscribers running faster with a minimum of delay and expense.

We are dedicated to providing the best service we can, and to constantly improving. In November 2017, for instance, we increased bandwidth speeds for more than 2500 of our subscribers, at no additional monthly costs! If you feel your connection isn't working as well as you'd like, please give us a call!

A: It's a bit complex, but you can think of it this way...
The Access Point (AP) controls the speed it sends data to the Subscriber Module (SM) at your home, based on the data plan configuration. It allocates a certain amount of virtual data space for each module, which we can call the "burst bucket". The AP sends data to each SM as fast as it can, up to the Maximum Burst Speed, from this "bucket" of data, but when the bucket is emptied, it refills at the data speed of the subscriber's plan. At this point, the effective data rate is now the speed of the plan, as the bucket is essentially being emptied as quickly as it's filled at that sustained data rate.

The configurable factors for the bucket are its size/capacity, which varies by plan (for instance, at the Base Plan, the download bucket is defined as 20MB. For the higher tiers, that amount is increased.), and the Maximum Burst Speed, which is set for 20 Mbps.

OK, so that's how it operates, but what does it actually do?
Well, the whole concept is that aside from bandwidth-intensive tasks like large file transfers or streaming video, most people use the Internet in a very "burst-y" way. For instance, when you click on a website, the server will send you all the contents and ads pretty quickly, but there usually isn't much traffic flowing as you are reading the page (so the bucket's capacity is refilling during that time). If you then click on a link for a new page, that new page is able to be transmitted to you at the higher rate until the bucket is emptied, and so forth. Similarly, e-mail and videogames tend to send and receive fairly small chunks of data, which means the burst mode can make a big difference for those, as well. On the other hand, those bandwidth-intensive tasks I mentioned above only see this benefit for the first few minutes of the transfer, before the speed settles down to the normal, sustained rate.

A: Some homes will have easy line-of-sight to our nearest tower, and installation will be a simple matter of mounting our transceiver to your roof. However, some homes are surrounded by trees, or far away from our nearest tower with trees in-between, or your home may be located in a topographical valley, or obstructed in some other way. In this case our technician will test the signal strength at greater heights to see what height is necessary to achieve line-of-sight, and the signal level necessary to provide the proper performance.

We offer up to 15ft of height included in the cost of your installation or upgrade. When more than 15ft of height is required to achieve line-of-sight from your home to our tower, we offer telescoping masts from 20 to 50ft. Unlike the bolted together 5ft sections that comprise the up-to-15ft of pole that is included with the base installation or upgrade fee, telescoping masts are a single, more technical piece of equipment, comprised of nested sections which collapse down for transport and removal, and telescope out for installation and increasing height. They require steadying guy wires in sets of 3 for every 10ft of height to ensure maximum stability, and usually require 2 technicians to install. They must also be anchored against your home (performed by our technicians), or in a concrete base which you as the homeowner or resident will need to install. Don't worry - we're happy to provide you with guidance and instructions. And once you've paid for the mast in full, it belongs to you. We will certainly remove it if you like, but it's also yours to keep if you move or change providers.

A: This is rather complicated, and has to do with the cost of the equipment, the requirements for installing the kinds of equipment which resides outside the home, and how our system operates.

A: OK.

A lot of the time, long-time customers will ask why, when they have been paying their bill on time, should they have to pay to upgrade the equipment? While we would love to be able to provide lower cost or free installations and upgrades, due to the realities of providing wireless broadband internet, the costs for installation, equipment upgrades, and network maintenance are not insignificant.

Cost of the equipment:

• Our service works quite differently than the typical service like DSL or Cable. DSL and cable modems remain inside the house in a controlled environment, and can be manufactured relatively inexpensively. Our service works wirelessly via line of site to a tower, and our equipment is therefore mounted on the outside of your home. That means our equipment has to withstand exposure to extreme Texas heat, to rain, to cold temperatures in the winter, and the curiosity of birds, bugs and other critters. Unfortunately, equipment that can withstand such extreme conditions is necessarily more expensive to manufacture. A typical DSL or cable modem may cost $30 to $50, whereas our wireless radio transceiver modules can cost upwards of $250.00, before accounting for antennas, mounting equipment, cabling, and other accessories described below.

Installation in Rural Central Texas:

• Installation: Whereas DSL and cable modems can usually be shipped straight to the customer for self-installation or picked up at a regional office, our outdoor equipment requires a trained technician to achieve line of sight by installing equipment on your roof or a tall pole.
• Location: Because a vast majority of our service area is in rural central Texas, driving distance from our one, centrally-located office averages 50 miles one-way.
• Transmitting equipment: In addition to the wireless transceiver module that actually transmits your data, the module requires an antenna to send and receive a strong-enough signal.
• Mounting equipment: the module and antenna must be mounted on or near your home on a mount, and attached to that mount firmly. Mounting equipment can include one or more of the following: a mounting arm similar to a satellite dish mount, a pole from 5 to 15ft in height, a tripod to secure the pole to a flat or peaked surface, a telescoping mast if over 15ft of height is required to achieve line-of-sight, brackets to secure a pole to the eave of a roof or the side of your home, and guy wires to secure and steady a pole greater than 15ft in height against wind shear.
• Cabling, wires and grounding: Cabling is required to transmit your data from the outside equipment to inside your home. Because the equipment must be properly grounded to protect it from power surges, ground wire with attachment accessories and an outdoor surge protector called a grounding block are required.
• Power and termination: We must penetrate an exterior wall to bring our cabling inside your home, and unless you have a central networking hub in your home we must terminate that cable on the inside with a wall plate. To power our outside equipment, a special power supply connected to the cabling and then to a power outlet is also required.


• We are a small business, not a multi-billion-dollar, multi-national corporation:
  We are a small, private company with one small office located in northwest Austin. We employ our office staff and field technicians directly, unlike many cable companies which use contractors who are often required to supply their own tools, equipment and vehicles. We are proud to provide our employees with health and workers compensation insurance, and all the tools and equipment they need to do their work. To keep billing simple and straightforward, we use one simple tax rate - Texas State Internet Sales tax, which is regular sales tax on amounts over $25.00 ( See Comptroller Rule 3.366, Internet Access Services http://comptroller.texas.gov/taxinfo/taxpubs/tx96_259.pdf), unlike some larger ISPs which often have hard-to-predict taxes and fees on their statements. We must cover all of our other costs from our regular monthly rate.


• Our network:
  Unlike cable or DSL internet, which provides wired service via buried underground copper or fiber optic cable directly to your neighborhood, our service is wireless. Just like the equipment we install at your home, our network equipment must also be outdoor-rated, transmit wirelessly over long distances, and be mounted on a network of towers throughout central Texas. Certified tower climbers are required for all installation, upgrade, repair and adjustment of network equipment. Towers themselves must be built or rented. The establishment, maintenance, expansion and upgrading of a wireless network is very capital-intensive. We don't get the same tax breaks as multi-billion-dollar, multi-national corporate internet service providers, and we don't carry the ongoing debts those types of corporations tend to carry.

Of course, if you have a question you don't see addressed here, please either email us at support@ecpi.com or call us at (512)257-1077!