Home Telecom
Network Management Policy

Home Telephone Company and Berkeley Cable Television [both] dba Home Telecom (“Home” or “Company”) provides this Policy in order to disclose its network management practices in accordance with the FCC’s Open Internet Rules. Additional Information about Home’s other policies and practices concerning broadband service are also available under the Legal Notices https://www.homesc.com/legal-notices/ section of the website. 

Home manages its network to ensure that all of its customers experience a safe and secure broadband internet environment that is fast, reliable and affordable. Home wants its customers to indulge in all the internet has to offer, whether it is social networking, streaming videos and music, or communicating through email and videoconferencing.

Home manages its network for a number of reasons, including optimization, as well as congestion- and security-protocol-management. Such practices are consistent with reasonable network management actions and are intended to improve the overall performance for customers.

Home’s Network Management Practices

Home uses various tools and industry standard techniques to manage its network and deliver fast, secure and reliable internet service. Such management tools and practices include the following:

I. Managing Congestion

Home periodically monitors the connections on its network in the aggregate to determine the rate of utilization. Home has deployed a non-blocking internet architecture in the majority of its network. Except of the facilities closest to the customer (local loop), the network has redundant facilities on separate links. If either link fails, traffic is routed to the other link. Home adds capacity to its network when utilization on either link reaches 80% capacity. The facilities closest to the customer are sized to fully meet the customer’s traffic requirements. Capacity on these links are also increased when traffic reaches 80% of capacity. Home may increase capacity by adding fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) nodes, transport, internet aggregation routers and bandwidth, as needed.

On Home’s network, all customers have access to all legal services, applications and content online and, in the unlikely event of congestion, most internet activities will be unaffected. Some customers, however, may experience longer download or upload times, or slower surf speeds on the web if instances of congestion occur on Home’s network.

Online conduct that abuses or threatens the Home network or which violates the Company’s Acceptable Use Policy, Internet service Terms and Conditions, or the Internet Service Agreement will result in the customer being asked to stop any such use immediately. A failure to respond or to cease any such conduct could result in service suspension or termination.

Home’s network and congestion management practices are ‘application-agnostic’, based on current network conditions, and are not implemented on the basis of customers’ online activities, protocols or applications. Home’s network management practices do not relate to any particular customer’s aggregate monthly data usage. Home does not prioritize or discriminate against any applications or protocols except for specialized networks and does not honor quality of service indicators from other carriers.

II. Network Security

Home knows the importance of securing its network and customers from network threats and annoyances. The company promotes the security of its network and patrons by providing resources to its customers for identifying and reporting such threats as spam, viruses, firewall issues, and phishing schemes. Home also deploys spam filters in order to divert spam from an online customer’s email inbox while allowing the customer to control which emails are identified as spam. Spam is quarantined in a separate file that the Customer may access. Email in such file will be automatically deleted if not accessed in 30 days.

As its normal practice, Home does not block any protocols, content or traffic for purposes of network management except that the company may block or limit such traffic as spam, viruses, malware, or denial of service attacks to protect network integrity and the security of our customers. Home does filter ports to reduce the spread of computer-related viruses and protect your computer from intruder access. If Home suspects traffic originated by its customers is virus related, Home will contact the suspected party. IF there is no response, the customer’s service will be suspended until the issue can be resolved.

Home does not currently engage in any application-specific behaviors in its network, except as maybe listed in the Specialized Service section of this policy.

III. Monitoring Schedule

Home has software that monitors the network for performance and provides performance results at minimum every five minutes. Alarms or alerts are generated if the performance is degraded. In addition, traffic is analyzed and trended to insure peak performance. When utilization reaches 80% in the redundant routes Home adds capacity or reroutes traffic to relieve congestion. Home also uses industry standard software tools to check for abnormal traffic flows, network security breaches, malware, loss, and damage to the network. If a breach is detected or high-volume users are brought to light by complaint, Home provides notification to the customer via email or phone. If a violation of Home’s policies has occurred and such violation is not remedied, Home will seek to suspend or terminate that customer’s service.

IV. Network Management Technology

Home manages its network with the goal of delivering a fast, safe and uncompromised broadband Internet experience to all of its customers. But high-speed bandwidth and network resources are not unlimited. Managing the network is essential for the promotion of the best possible broadband Internet experience by all of Home’s customers. The company uses reasonable network management and test practices that are consistent with industry standards. In addition, Home is required by the FCC to test a random set of customers for speed and latency periodically during the year. By using this service, the customer agrees to allow Home to perform these tests.   Home tries to use tools and technologies that are minimally intrusive and, in its independent judgment guided by industry experience, among the best in class. Of course, the company's network management practices will change and evolve along with the uses of the Internet and the challenges and threats on the Internet.

Additionally, Home employs a variety of industry-standard tools, applications and devices to monitor, secure and maintain its network, including the following:

• network graphing solutions;
• latency measurement software; and
• bandwidth and performance measurement platforms;

V. Service Descriptions

Home offers broadband service over Cable Modem, DSL, FTTH facilities and leased transport. Home offers FTTH speeds ranging from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps, Cable Modem speeds ranging from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps, DSL speeds from 1Mbps to 15 Mbps. Service offerings are detailed in the services section of the website. All of Home’s broadband service is capable of supporting real time applications. Home’s dial-up data service is not suitable for real time applications.

VI. Network Performance

Home broadband services are best effort performance. Home makes every effort to support advertised speeds and will dispatch repair technicians to customer sites to perform speed tests as needed to troubleshoot and resolve speed and application performance issues that are caused by Home’s network. Home measures availability, latency, and aggregate utilization on the network and strives to meet internal service level targets in its network. However, the customer’s performance is also affected by the particular website being accessed, capacity in the public internet beyond the Home network and the customer’s computer, inside wiring, wireless router, distance from office and other customer equipment.

Customers can test their actual speeds using the speed test found on the company website or by going to http://speedtest.homesc.com.

In addition, the following chart shows the testing results from Home’s internal test.

Fiber-to-the-Home
Plan	Advertised Download Speed	Kbps/Mbps	Actual Average Download Speed	Kbps/Mbps	Percentage of Advertised Speeds	Latency (ms)
Res Xpress 1 Mbps	1	Mbps	.95	Mbps	95%	15
Res Xpress 5 Mbps	5	Mbps	4.89	Mbps	98%	13
Res Xpress 10 Mbps	10	Mbps	9.25	Mbps	93%	13
Res Xpress 50 Mbps	50	Mbps	45.25	Mbps	91%	15
Res Xpress 100 Mbps	100	Mbps	95.75	Mbps	96%	16
Res GigaFi 1 Gbps	1000	Mbps	942.91	Mbps	94%	14
Bus Xpress Basic 1x1 Contract	1	Mbps	.94	Mbps	94%	4
Bus FTTH 10 Mbps Contract	10	Mbps	9.97	Mbps	100%	3
Bus FTTH 50 Mbps Contract	50	Mbps	48.95	Mbps	98%	3
Bus FTTH 100 Mbps Contract	100	Mbps	96.13	Mbps	96%	2
Bus GigaFi FTTH 1 Gbps	1000	Mbps	942.68	Mbps	96%	2

 

Cable Modem
Plan	Advertised Download Speed	Kbps/Mbps	Actual Average Download Speed	Kbps/Mbps	Percentage of Advertised Speeds	Latency (ms)
Res Xpress 1 Mbps	1	Mbps	.81	Mbps	81%	19
Res Xpress 5 Mbps	5	Mbps	4.76	Mbps	95%	22
Res Xpress 10 Mbps	10	Mbps	9.53	Mbps	95%	28
Res Xpress 50 Mbps	50	Mbps	47.64	Mbps	95%	19
Res Xpress 100 Mbps	100	Mbps	91.45	Mbps	91%	28
Bus Xpress Basic 1x1 Contract	1	Mbps	.98	Mbps	98%	13
Bus CM 10 Mbps	10	Mbps	9.48	Mbps	95%	13
Bus CM 50 Mbps	50	Mbps	48.14	Mbps	96%	13
Bus Xpress Ultra Contract	100	Mbps	95.77	Mbps	96%	10

 

DSL
Plan	Advertised Download Speed	Kbps/Mbps	Actual Average Download Speed	Kbps/Mbps	Percentage of Advertised Speeds	Latency (ms)
Xpress 768 Kbps	.768	Kbps	.750	Kbps	98%	36
Xpress 1 Mbps	1	Mbps	1.02	Mbps	102%	31
Xpress 3 Mbps	3	Mbps	2.85	Mbps	95%	25
Xpress 6 Mbps	6	Mbps	6.14	Mbps	102%	33
Xpress 10 Mbps	10	Mbps	10.03	Mbps	100%	33
Bus Xpress Basic Contract	1	Mbps	.99	Mbps	99%	30
Bus Xpress Essential Contract	3	Mbps	2.89	Mbps	96%	28
Bus Xpress Premium Contract	5	Mbps	5.06	Mbps	101%	18
Bus Xpress Extreme Contract	10	Mbps	10.10	Mbps	101%	32
Bus Xpress Ultimate Contract	15	Mbps	15.15	Mbps	101%	32

 
 
 

VI. Specialized Services

Home provides Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) services to end users using virtual private network architecture. This service, also known as a Specialized Service, is separated from the company’s best effort internet services on the network. Since Specialized Service traffic has dedicated bandwidth that is separated from best effort broadband internet traffic, our broadband customers will experience no impact on broadband services resulting from Specialized Service traffic.

VII. Device Attachment Rules

Home does not employ any device attachment rules for its network for its wireline broadband service, except as may be provided elsewhere herein,

VIII. Other Notices