FCC changes its rules, puts educational spectrum up for open auction
Rural school districts had hoped to close “homework gaps” via access to wireless spectrum set aside for educational use 50 years ago
A lot has been written about the “homework gap” in recent years, meaning the disadvantage placed on students in low-income and rural areas where they can’t get speedy internet service to keep up with the expectations schools increasingly have for student online access. Some rural districts have started building their own broadband networks, and many others had hoped to follow their lead using a chunk of bandwidth long ago set aside by the federal government for educational purposes.
Those hopes were dashed last week, when the FCC revised its rules and decided to sell licenses to that bandwidth at open auction. At issue is a small slice of electromagnetic spectrum—the frequencies that carry wireless signals for everything from remote controls to radio—that the government carved out more than 50 years ago for instructional television, and later designated Educational Broadband Service, or EBS, for the internet age. Now, on the cusp of issuing a bunch of new EBS licenses that will cover huge swaths of rural America, the FCC decided to turn EBS over to the free market.
The minimal educational-use requirements for EBS spectrum are no more. Even more disappointing to rural education advocates was the FCC’s decision to axe a proposal that schools and education nonprofits get first dibs on new spectrum licenses before a competitive bidding process opens (a pre-auction window for Native American tribes was kept).
“We are heartbroken,” said Tom Rolfes, education IT manager for the Nebraska Information Technology Commission. Rolfes’s group is part of a Nebraska initiative to wirelessly extend school broadband into rural communities where more than a third of the students have no broadband access at home, according to a state study. The Nebraskans already have the wired backbone of their network in place, connecting all their schools. They also have towers ready to blast high-speed internet into surrounding communities. What they CONTINUE READING: FCC changes its rules, puts educational broadband service on free market