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FCC Approves Plan To Spend $5B Over Next Five Years On School Wi-Fi
itwbennett writes: The Federal Communications Commission, in a 3-2 party-line vote Friday, approved a plan to revamp the 17-year-old E-Rate program, which pays for telecom services for schools and libraries, by phasing out funding for voice service, Web hosting and paging services, and redirecting money to Wi-Fi. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler had proposed a $5 billion budget for Wi-Fi, but Republican commissioners and some lawmakers had questioned where the money would come from. Still, the E-Rate revamp (PDF) approved Friday contemplates a $1 billion-a-year target for Wi-Fi projects "year after year," Wheeler said.
How about 5BN to turn off WiFi at schools, make kids and teachers alike actually log off Facebook for the two or three actual hours of education they get a day?
Provide money and guidance to the local school systems then let them buy the approved technology they need rather than what is dictated to them. Why is WiFi better or more important than web hosting? What if a school already has good WiFi but needs devices to make use of that network? Sounds like the "phasing out" process is more like "last call" at a bar and tells people to get those services from E-Rate now whether they need it or not cause soon the trough will only be feeding you WiFi. Guidance on good economic solutions for school technology needs and funding is what the school systems need. But hey keep on shoveling "one size fits all" technology into the schools. It keeps the vendors happy even if it doesn't help the schools or children all that much.
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Facebook can be pretty easily blocked at the router level. On the other hand, there's a variety of lesson plans and administrative tools used in education that can benefit from better connectivity.
I think the question is, who will earn a large part of that $1B/year? What "partner" is ready to facilitate this mass wi-fi rollout?
Actually, Wi-Fi is cheaper at delivering Internet access to teacher and lab computers than wired connections. While slower, there is only a need for one PoE port to cover many computers. For schools with older wiring, this is probably a more cost effective methods of providing that access.
It's been true for hotels. Although this at first seems counterintuitive, for awhile, newer hotels, which had been built with Cat 5 to the room, had wired internet but no wireless, while older hotels, who couldn't retrofit wired but *could* put in access points, had wireless but no wired. Now pretty much everyone has wireless. In the near future, you may be able to guess within a few years when a hotel was built by whether or not there's a RJ45 socket in the wall.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.