We have a number of growing expenses that we are going to need to meet this upcoming year.
1. Network throughput has grown by over 50% since August of this year. This has increased our backhaul costs substantially.
2. We are in the process of negotiating a new agreement with Westar energy. This new agreement will likely increase our utility power bill by over 200%. With over 300 sites attached to Westar illumination heads, this substantially increases our monthly utility bill.
3. To better serve downtown Lawrence and its surrounding area, we are now paying a monthly tower lease fee to Douglas County for the 11th & Massachusetts tower site.
4. An upstream outage at Cogent three weeks ago took the entire network offline. Though this hasn't happened often, we are going to be move toward a multi-homed network architecture. This will allow us to continue service even if one of our upstream providers is offline.
There are a variety of ways to meet these expenses, and we want to take everyone’s temperature on the various options. We will be announcing new prices and, possibly service offerings and/or bandwidth management mechanisms on December 1.
Before we make these changes we wanted to give our members a chance to have some input into the process. Please select the link below to take a brief survey.
Wicked Broadband Pricing and Policy Survey
http://goo.gl/Jdw6n
