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FCC Approves Subsidy Plan to Upgrade School and Library Networks
The Washington Post reports that, "In a 3-2 vote along party lines Friday, the FCC greenlit a plan to spend $2 billion over the next two years on subsidies for internal networks. The move also begins a process to phase out some subsidies under the federal program, known as E-Rate, for services and equipment that are on the decline, such as pagers and dial-up Internet service." That sounds like a lot of money, and it is, but as usual in politics it's the result of a messy process:
The original plan called for spending $5 billion on WiFi over five years, in line with a push by the Obama administration to bring next-gen broadband and WiFi to 99 percent of students over the same period. Those funds would have partly come from savings as a result of transitioning away from supporting legacy technologies. The proposal would also have eliminated an existing requirement that E-Rate funds be spent first on broadband services before being applied to WiFi. In past years, the cost of broadband service meant that money was rarely left over for upgrading WiFi connections. But the FCC's proposal was ultimately scaled back late Thursday amid Republican objections that the E-Rate program can't afford the changes. The final proposal's two-year, $2 billion commitment accounts for the money the FCC has already set aside for WiFi upgrades, but it does not commit the FCC to funding WiFi upgrades at that same rate for the following three years.
Seriously - why? There are less than 100,000 K-12 schools in the US, we're talking about $10,000 PER SCHOOL in the US, each year. I just upgraded my office (12 Ubiquiti access points, covering 45,000 square feet - probably about the average size of a school campus) to 150 Mbps down/65 Mbps up FiOS for $250 per month. Should cost less than $1000 for the hardware, and less than $3000 per year for the service. Where does the other $6,000 go - for the first year? And what about all the following years?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
i wonder how many politicians and union hacks will get funded by this money?
Your funding costs are a bit off there first poster.
The schools I have been in have the following costs to set up a functioning network that can be managed down to a student level.
Cisco 4400 Wlan controller with 50 ap license $7200 (amazon) (no longer produced but functional for a school)
Cisco 1252 aironet ap $300 ea x 50 = $15,000 (amazon)
Cisco POE switch to power all the AP's SG200-50p poe smart switch $800 (amazon)
Cabling installed by contractor 12,000 feet (based on my own install at the last school I was at for 15 AP's taking 3,000 feet) $unknown
$10,000 per school is nothing when just the hardware for a large campus would cost over $23,000 plus cat5e/6 plus labor.
For those of you wondering why so many AP's are needed, most schools have MANY firewalls made of brick that are double thick and radio waves just dont like to penetrate that. On top of that, schools contain upwards of THOUSANDS of bodies sucking in the RF along with hard corners and multiple thousands of devices.
I have seen students with their laptop, phone, and kindle all out and connected at the same time.
So many schools, librarys and entire towns have no Internet access here in Rural Washington. The rich suburbs down the road near the lakes do, but not the inner city (very small city) does. My mothers town everyone is on dialup. They did start beaming in microwave to the town library and enable wifi. So People drive in and sit in the cars to get online, crazy. Funny thing, she use to get a flickering of 4G Verizon, but verizon shared the tower with the microwave isp, so company made a decision to cut Verizon's data to feed more bandwidth to the library. Now everyone is stuck on dialup. This is about 50 miles north of Spokane, WA.
This is crazy as everyone has underground power and telephone lines, but no internet. The power company put everything underground to save money from falling trees every year, and that had to be expensive as hell.
Almost like this plan except now with more bacony goodness!
Dupe.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Why does the Federal government have to butt it's fat ass into EVERY FUCKIN' THING IN THE COUNTRY. What the hell.
If there was CLEARLY something that was a local issue, it's school WiFi.
And we wonder why the Feds have run up an EIGHTEEN GAZILLLION FUCKIN DOLLAR debt.
Fuckin assholes. Makes me want to build a compound and heavily arm myself and shit.
It seems like a waste of money that i do not want my tax dollars going towards.
What does McDonalds have that our schools don't have?
1. Affordable food that students will eat.
2. Free WiFi.
Federal agencies should regulate.
Congress should subsidize.
Republicans tent to regard education as a system for making democrats. They attribute this to a massive conspiracy among teachers and unions to indoctrinate children.
$10k per school per year to improve wifi is nothing??
i get your point that the other guy is worse but come on, this isn't "nothing".
Given these factors, why are we trying to upgrade to next generation wifi specifically? I'd imagine that some schools would want to upgrade their CAT 5 based networks. Why are we not enabling that?