New Rates, a discussion, plan for future
We haven’t increased our residential rates since we started serving residential customers. In fact, we reduced our internet service rates when the last price increase came from KPUD (we ate 100% of the increase on gig service, and 20% of the increase on 100mbit). The utility district has increased our access rates to cover ongoing operations for the residential fiber network. The district (Nov 8, 2022 packet) posted their rates as public information. We are changing our invoice to reflect in detail how the service is billed. We will show two line items. The first line will be the KPUD access fee. The KPUD access fee covers KPUD connecting your home to our datacenter, network maintenance, and KPUD telecom operations. If you have a service outage in the KPUD network, including the drop to your home, KPUD promptly repairs it at no fee to you.
The second line reflects the Net253 internet service fee. This is the service we provide to connect your home to the internet. This fee includes operating our datacenter, connecting our datacenter via multiple routes (separated by miles) out of the county, buying internet exchange bandwidth from NoaNet and others, all operating expenses for Net253 (book keeping, credit card processing, customer service, salary, fuel, tools, insurances, etc).
Here is the table for pricing effective 1/1/2023
KPUD access fee, 100mbit service $49
KPUD access fee, 1000mbit service $59
Net253 Internet service, 100mbit, 12 months, $17
Net253 Internet service, 100mbit, monthly, $21
Net253 Internet service, 1000mbit, 12 month, $36
Net253 Internet service, 1000mbit, monthly, $40
You save $4 a month when you sign up for the annual plan. After the first year, we keep you at the annual rate but don’t lock you into a new contract. When we change rates after your first year, you get the new annual rate. Our effective rate is $66 for 100mbit, or $95 for 1000mbit.
We took on significant costs to increase our reliability on transport out of the county. Before implementing this enhancement, outages due to KPUD equipment was 97% of our service downtime in 2021. Our uptime for 2021 was 99.8%. Our uptime for 2022 YTD is 99.995%. In 2023 we intend to add a truly redundant route from our data center to a second KPUD node on Bainbridge. This will give us true dual path redundancy for all but 1000 feet of fiber that is buried underground near our datacenter.