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Obama SOTU Highlights Facts-Optional School Broadband Initiative

Broadband has always been a lip service favorite among politicians, rhetoric about "innovation" and a "connected tomorrow" distracting us eternally from the country's high prices, lack of competition and total government apathy to both. Last night's State of the Union was no exception, President Obama re-iterating a rather vague promise made last June that the FCC would help bring 100 Mbps broadband to 99% of schools in the next four years.

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Dubbed ConnectED (pdf), the initiative aims to pull money from the historically somewhat dysfunctional FCC E-Rate program to help subsidize these school deployments. There has been no meaningful metrics released indicating whether this program has had any impact whatsoever on school broadband deployment so far.

“Last year, I also pledged to connect 99 percent of our students to high-speed broadband over the next four years,” the President Stated. "Tonight, I can announce that with the support of the FCC and companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sprint, and Verizon, we've got a down payment to start connecting more than 15,000 schools and twenty million students over the next two years, without adding a dime to the deficit."

Originally, the Administration had considered levying a new USF tax on your broadband connections, but quietly backed off that idea after significant backlash.

That backlash was justified; the E-Rate program has doled out nearly $30 billion since its inception in 1998. While much of that money went to quality work connecting the nation's schools and libraries, much of it was lost in a wormhole of loose government oversight and fraud, resulting most libraries lacking the bandwidth to serve visitors despite the billions spent in endless, often-untracked subsidies to telecom companies.

An accompanying SOTU fact sheet (pdf) doesn't offer any additional facts on the initiative, other than to note that the government in the next few weeks will announce "new philanthropic partnerships" with companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sprint and Verizon. It's not specified just what these partnerships entail, or if they'll involve ponying up cash to schools, or yet more subsidies to companies.

While such private partnerships can do good by shoring up desperately-struggling school budgets, many of these kinds of initiatives are little more than glorified advertisements for company and carrier services. They're efforts that make for excellent PR events to imply involved companies are being highly altruistic, but their influence on actual school improvements is never tracked.

Combine a poorly managed subsidy fund with such glorified ad campaigns and you've effectively got a ConnectED initiative that seemingly refuses to use and hard data or metrics. It's a rehashing of existing ideas that may help here and there, but with most broadband references made in DC appears to be largely political theater.

Most recommended from 29 comments



WHT
join:2010-03-26
Rosston, TX

2 recommendations

WHT

Member

Philanthropic Partnerships

Wordsmith Alert!

You cannot use "philanthropic" and "Verizon" in the same sentence.

Solutions
@comcast.net

2 recommendations

Solutions

Anon

Would 100 mbps at ALL schools result in any student improvement?

A better question is would having 100 mbps in EVERY school actually result in improved student performance? Evidence so far would indicate the problems in many public schools are not related to availability of high speed internet, but due to poor teachers and no support by parents for the students at home. While a technical solution is relatively easy to accomplish, the real problems in the schools won't be addressed at all by a "100 mbps" initiative.