Ygnition is an American Private Cable Operator (PCO) and broadband Internet services company headquartered in Seattle, Washington focused on the MDU market. It is a privately held company with backers including ComVentures, a venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California, Advanced Equities and Chrysalis Ventures. Prior to November 2003, the company went by the name "Interquest Communications."

Ygnition was founded in September, 2001 as a broadband Internet services company, acquiring the assets of a number of bankrupt or distressed broadband service providers. In late 2003 Ygnition launched cable television service at a number of its apartment communities and has since focused its acquisitions on cable instead of just broadband.

Ygnition, like other Private Cable Operators, typically purchases Right of entry for cable or data services from apartment building owners or developers of condominiums allowing them to be the exclusive provider of certain services - typically Cable Television. Ygnition normally will bundle Internet and VOIP service along with its cable TV offering if the contract allows.

As of 2007, Ygnition has Internet access available to roughly 150,000 apartment units and Cable television service available to approximately 50,000 units across seven states.

As Ygnition looks to extend its market through acquisitions, it is also expanding the services they offer. Ygnition is expanding into the VOIP market through partnerships with various VOIP wholesalers. Ygnition purchases cable and satellite television service from providers like DISH network and others, then redistributes them through their networks. Internet service is delivered to its service locations from anywhere from a single T1 to OC3 or ethernet over fiber, however multiple T1 circuits is the most common method.

Ygnition uses Traffic Shaping to prioritize VOIP traffic. Because of the way traffic shaping works, all bandwidth is available to all traffic at all times, with VOIP traffic taking precedence when needed.

Ygnition's BBB Ratings

Ygnition has a Satisfactory rating with the Better Business Bureau in Houston and a satisfactory rating in Dallas, Texas.,

Ygnition has a Satisfactory BBB rating in Seattle, Washington.

Services provided by Ygnition

As per Ygnition's service agreement for $49.95 a month, the subscriber may have 2 Email accounts and;

"Use of IAS, E-Mail Storage. Subject to the compliance by Subscriber with all Terms and Conditions of this Agreement, and in exchange for recurring payment of subscription fees, Subscriber shall have the right to use the IAS for accessing the Internet, and for sending and receiving e-mail. Subscriber shall have the right to store up to and including ten Megabytes (10 MB) of e-mail data on the Ygnition Networks server. Subscriber shall be automatically charged a monthly storage for each Megabyte of data in excess of the Free Storage Amount"

For $74.95 a month the subscriber gains 1 static IP address.

Pricing can vary by market and bundled services.

Services not provided for by Ygnition

Website hosting is not a service provided for by Ygnition. No Server space is provided beyond the 10 MB e-mail storage space. However, it is similar to other services in that subscribers are prohibited from hosting their own websites by the no server policy.

Ygnition offers unlimited internet connection time. They do place limits and restrictions on subscriber internet activities. Access to file sharing and downloading is limited and can, at Ygnition's sole discretion, result in service termination.

Ygnition Criticism

Like subscriber services on industry standard cable broadband ISPs, Ygniton reserves and exercise the rights to restrictions on internet service provided to subscribers. Several of the restrictions are commonsense and including most restrictions on activities considered to be criminal activity. Activities such as spamming, virus writing, harassment, and copyright infringement are widely prohibited in the internet industry.

Peer to Peer file sharing is a legal, and increasingly common internet activity that Ygnition severely limits. Peer to peer or p2p file sharing is a modern file transfer protocol that is gaining wide use for its ability to offer fast transfer of large files over distributed networks. P2p offers an advantage to small content providers in that by distributing files from several "seeding" computers the load on a single upload source server is avoided. Common p2p applications include azureus, emule and bit torrent.

Ygnition reserves the right to unilateral termination of service regarding file sharing without notice. In the language of the service agreement; "Peer-to-peer file sharing: Ygnition Networks does not support unrestricted peer-to-peer file sharing and related downloads. File-sharing programs, at the sole discretion of Ygnition Networks, may be limited in order to preserve the capacity of the network. Service to Subscribers that continue to use an inordinate level of bandwidth due to peer-to-peer file sharing and related downloads after being informed by Ygnition Networks of the unacceptable usage, may be terminated without notice." Ygnition has not provided definition of what they consider "unrestricted peer-to-peer file sharing" nor have they defined "inordinate bandwidth"

In practice Ygnition service representatives inform subscribers that they do not support p2p file sharing period...

Like subscriber services on industry standard cable broadband ISPs, Ygnition reserves and practices the right to "to discontinue any and all Services to Subscriber at any time, without prior notice or liability, for any conduct which Ygnition Networks, in its sole and unfettered discretion, determines to violate the Agreement or is otherwise harmful to Ygnition Networks interests or the interest of others."

The primary justification Ygnition gives for service termination is bandwidth use. The primary reason they do not allow p2p file sharing is bandwidth use. As has been discussed bandwidth is also the primary limitation to Ygnition service. Competing cable service providers also reserve the right to restrict legal p2p file sharing. DSL and dial-up service providers have only the individual line speed boundaries to limit use of p2p file sharing.

In the case of service termination "Subscriber shall have no right to be re-connected, except on terms acceptable to Ygnition Networks in their sole discretion." This should also be thought of in light of the fact that if Ygnition refuses to reconnect, the subscriber has no access to competing cable providers even when those providers service the local market. In fact, when Ygnition services an apartment complex the tenant has no access to cable ISP access at all. This is, however, typical of all ISP's, even in residential areas.

Currently, Ygnition does not offer true "high speed" internet to several of its properties in Texas. Some of the complexes have one T1 line shared among 40 or more residents. This creates frequent amounts of network downtime and limited bandwidth. Although they claim to limit P2P and file sharing at least one property reports that most users are unable to do simple things like listen to streaming audio, video, or play online games which use very little bandwidth. On an average day at this property it takes over 450ms to ping their servers and many trace route tests have shown that $50+ a month is not getting residents the service they expect.