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.

Comments

Why - why $1 billion a year?

[LynnwoodRooster]

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?

Re:Why - why $1 billion a year?

[Noah Haders]

The most expensive part is employing tech staff to connect and troubleshoot everything.

Re:Why - why $1 billion a year?

[Noah Haders]

wifi setup requires hardly any maintenance. 1-2 headcount per school district at most. chances are they already have admins on staff. a little training is all that might be needed.

OK, that's cool. so $10k for wifi equipment and $150k for two unionized benefits jobs to maintain it, annually. that equipment is a rip off!

Re:Why - why $1 billion a year?

[Curunir_wolf]

Seriously - why? ... Where does the other $6,000 go - for the first year?

It goes to the equipment the NSA needs to collect all the data, connect it with the students and their parents and their home computers, and record and store all the communication that happens. Duh.

Re:Why - why $1 billion a year?

[SuricouRaven]

Each school building needs multiple access points. On a network of such high node density (ie, thirty laptops in one room) you can't just stick bog-standard APs up - you need a managed wireless solution capable of dynamically adjusting freqency allocation according to demand and load-balancing access points. That means high-end APs, an expensive controller, possible upgrades to the wired network to handle it. You'll also need one high-skill administrator per district, and one low-skill technician per school to handle all the regular maintanance and repair, including user tech support and making sure the filters are quickly reconfigured every time a student finds a new term that gets something inappropriate on image search.

Re:Why - why $1 billion a year?

[sgt scrub]

Content filtering is mandatory in K12 schools and can be fairly expensive. Hardware in schools take a beating and need more frequent replacements. If you think network equipment is bulletproof do some work for a school. You can grill food on some of their routers. If it were my decision, there would be 10G network to all public schools and companies would be allowed to bid to be providers using bandwidth branching from those hops. It would push down costs, create an open business model, increase bandwidth to all areas of cities, and move schools closer to were they need to be technologically.

Re:Why - why $1 billion a year?

[davester666]

That is because:

1. AT&T knows you are a library, and not home user, so you have a nice fat budget, and they would like as big a chunk of it as they can get.
2. [for the GP] Everybody knows you need an expensive Cisco router, no matter how small your school is.

$10,000 isnt much to set up a school.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Rural Washington needs internet access.

[BrookHarty]

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.

Re:kickbacks? sheesh..

[Curunir_wolf]

yes and no ... Unions that actually do their job protect jobs are good BUT there are too many unions that are just as corrupt as the government and the Corporations that they fight against.

What are you talking about? Unions are GREAT! Without a union, workers are subject to exploitation by corporations. With a union, you get to be exploited by corporations AND unions! It's a double-tap!

Re: kickbacks? sheesh..

[Redbehrend]

Every union I have been part of has screwed us, has gotten paid more than us and lied about funds. I still get letters about legal actions and that was LONG ago.. The only union I have ever enjoyed is teamsters but that's because everyone is afraid of them lol.