Educators Discuss Methods for Affordable Broadband Buildout to Schools, Libraries
E-rate is “the most important thing we do at this agency,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said as educators and technologists met at commission headquarters Tuesday to discuss an E-rate overhaul. “What’s important is not broadband qua broadband, but what broadband enables. If we're not using that enablement to address the issue of how we educate our students and provide opportunity for our citizens, shame on us."
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"The challenge is no longer connection,” said Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. “The challenge is capacity.” Expanding funding for the program would be welcome, she said, noting the fund hasn’t seen a broad adjustment for inflation since 1998, and has lost a lot of purchasing power. A properly funded and administered E-rate program can “reinvigorate learning” on a national scale, she said.
Simply having one nonincumbent provider in the bidding process for technology procurement tends to lower prices by as much as 50 percent, said Evan Marwell, CEO of Education SuperHighway, which advocates for increased use of technology in schools. “Best practice” schools use all the options they have available, such as leasing dark fiber and leveraging nonincumbent backhaul providers to cut costs of transport to Internet exchange points, he said. Best-practice schools that can’t get affordable bandwidth from carriers self-provision their own fiber networks, he said. Marwell cited a goal of lowering the cost of wide area network connections to $750 for a gigabit, and $3 per megabit. “These prices are possible,” he said, saying a quarter of schools are currently paying less than $4 per megabit.
Commissioner Mike O'Rielly said that, influenced by the thinking of commissioners Ajit Pai and Rosenworcel, he’s drawn up some “easily achievable guideposts": First, E-rate changes must not increase costs on consumers, who pay into the USF. “I would be particularly concerned about diverting limited funding to new E-rate pilot projects,” he said. Decisions about funding for technology use within schools should be left to “local officials that understand the needs of their communities,” he said. E-rate matching requirements, now as low as 10 percent, must be made consistent with other programs in order to control costs, he said. E-rate must also leverage private-sector networks, not overbuild them, O'Rielly said. Better pricing information for schools and libraries will be helpful, O'Rielly said, but he’s “extremely leery” of contemplating the commission setting those prices.
Some noted their concern about portability in funding. Robert Mahaffey, director-communications at the Rural School and Community Trust, asked about the impact on schools’ ability to plan smart multiyear use of resources in mobile student populations. Ahniwake Rose, executive director of the National Indian Education Association, expressed similar concerns. American Indians move to homelands for ceremonies, and often follow migrant patterns for work, she said: “We're one of the most mobile populations in the country.” Rosenworcel said she supports multiyear applications to help with the ability to plan, which takes “effort and strategic foresight,” she said. It also helps with streamlining and cutting administrative costs, she said.
E-rate is “the nation’s largest educational technology program,” and it deserves more attention in the minds of parents and library patrons, Rosenworcel said. In a school setting, she said, it’s important to “look at your children and get beyond the idea that a book was good enough for me, why shouldn’t it be good enough for them?” If Americans expect their children to be successful, she said, “we cannot strand them in classrooms that were developed for the industrial age economy.”