Tag Archives: broadstripe

Meetings

Meetings: Park plans, potluck, ribbon cutting, and Broadstripe

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Photo by Bridget Christian
Photo by Bridget Christian
6:30pm Tonight at the Jefferson Community Center: Park enhancement and expansion with discussion of Beacon Mountain, the Park service road and promenade, improvements to Jefferson Playfield, and the Jefferson skatepark and basketball court.

Update: Missed one while assembling this post:
5:30pm Wednesday (tomorrow) at the Beacon Hill Library: SDOT community open house regarding the planned changes for Columbian Way between Beacon Avenue South and 15th Avenue South.

6:30pm Thursday at the Beacon Hill Library Community Room: North Beacon Hill Council potluck and December meeting.

10:00am Saturday next to the Beacon Hill light rail station on Lander Street: Festival Street ribbon cutting ceremony — free doughnuts and politicians!

1:00pm Saturday at the Central Area Senior Center: Broadstripe is to report on their February promises to the 30th Ave Neighbors group on the status of their recent service upgrades. Beacon Hill Broadstripe customers might also be interested in attending. Via Central District News

7:00pm next Wednesday (the 9th) at the Jefferson Community Center: Follow-up meeting with Seattle City Light regarding the new power lines going up the west side of the hill and the new higher poles running along South Stevens Street. Seattle City Light Superintendent Jorge Carrasco is expected to present remediation options to the nearby affected neighbors.

Check the event calendar for more.

Life on the Hill

Does your Broadstripe service meet expectations (yet)?

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(A) Broadstripe (representative) speaks up in the comments of a previous item:

We have been taking steps to improve High Speed Data services to your area. We have been systematically troubleshooting and repairing our nodes to provide exceptional service to our subscribers. Please contact us directly at earningourstripes@broadstripe.com so we can confirm if you’re (sic) concerns have been resolved with our recent upgrades or if we can do anything further to assist in resolving any on-going service concerns.

We’ve been pretty lucky here; we have not experienced the lengthy periods of complete internet outages many of you have reported and have repeatedly gone back and forth with Broadstripe over (many to the point of giving up on cable broadband entirely).

In my recent experience, I have seen some improvement: speeds during peak usage periods (evenings) are not nearly as horrible as I’d seen in September, but they’re usually only a tenth of the advertised speed of 15 megabits per second. At off-peak times, I have seen very brief peaks above 10 megabits near the beginning of a single download, but after a megabyte or two, the speeds appear to be throttled down to an average somewhere around 3 megabits, one fifth of the advertised rate.

As a rule-of-thumb, downloading one megabyte (1,048,576 bytes or 1024 kilobytes) should take:

  • about 15 seconds at 500 kilobits per second (500Kbps).
  • about 8 seconds at one megabit per second (1Mbps).
  • less than one second at ten megabits per second (10Mbps).

I encourage you to run your own tests — real-world tests like downloading software updates or loading large web pages as well as speed tests performed through sites like speedtest.net and Broadband Reports — and report your findings in the comments.

Those of you who have experienced general outages: have they become shorter or less frequent? Has their support staff become more responsive and solved your issues?

Please also send your experiences back to Broadstripe.

Opinion

Commentary: Beacon Hill’s internet service needs improvement

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T-shirt slogan that many Beaconians can identify with. Photo by Will Glynn.
T-shirt slogan that many Beaconians can identify with. Photo by Will Glynn.
by George Robertson

(Editor’s note: This commentary was originally sent as an email to several members of the Seattle City Council today, as well as to the Beacon Hill Mailing List. Coincidentally, this evening our Broadstripe internet service was out for more than one hour.)

After comparing notes with some of my neighbors about their internet service, I thought I should ask once again for some relief from the dismal internet service we have on Beacon Hill. I have written to council members before on this topic and I have uniformly gotten referred to some bureaucrat by whichever elected council member I wrote to. Each time the bureaucrat was very nice, asked a couple of questions, and described the service we have, and refreshed the picture of whatever stage the City was in at the moment in negotiations with the monopoly providers of cable. And then they would sum it up by telling me that we have great internet service. If this is going to be another replay of that merry-go-round, just delete this message. If you actually give a damn about the ability of this city to incubate new small business in the south end, then please read on and reply.

The first thing you have to take seriously is that there is a problem. The second is that it won’t be solved without adding new competitive service provider(s) to Beacon Hill. By competitive, I mean services with higher real delivered, as opposed to advertised, upload speeds than Comcast and Broadstripe offer to their business class customers now, and with much better net neutrality in bandwidth management practices.
Continue reading Commentary: Beacon Hill’s internet service needs improvement →

Life on the Hill

Broadstripe cable TV & internet provider files for bankruptcy protection

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Broadstripe (formerly Millennium Digital Media), cable television, internet, and telephone provider for a large portion of Beacon Hill, the entire Central Area, and parts of Capitol Hill and Queen Anne (inside the dashed red lines), has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The City of Seattle Office of Cable Communications notes:

The local Broadstripe office confirmed the filing and will send us formal notification. We will meet with them as soon as is feasible. Broadstripe also confirmed its commitment to continue providing service to Seattle customers with no interruptions during the financial restructuring. We will monitor customer calls to the Cable Office to confirm that service does not suffer.

This action was apparently taken back at the beginning of January, according to the city website.

I wonder if this might light a fire under the development of a municipal cable or fiber deployment like Tacoma has with their Click! Network. A city task force concluded in 2005 that “in order to remain competitive, Seattle needs fiber-optic lines to the home.” As of last spring, the city was still looking for a partner to help build and run such a system.