FCC Approves Plan To Spend $5B Over Next Five Years On School Wi-Fi 54
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:How about 5BN... (Score:4, Funny)
But... how will the kiddies learn about one-click buying?
How about 5BN... (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
On the other hand, there's a variety of lesson plans and administrative tools used in education that can benefit from better connectivity.
Such as?
Re: (Score:3)
How to circumvent router level blocking of Facebook?
-Rick
Re: (Score:2)
Attendance and evaluation are done directly into the SIS in most cases now. The biggest systems are web only, in fact. Many schools are tracking attendance by the minute to maximize their funding. Data is available to principals via their browser (or pushed in some cases) so they're aware of what's going on in their schools. Tracking of performance can be done across skills now, giving a much better picture of what the student needs help in rather than just "C-."
I'll admit I don't work on the lesson plans m
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I'd like to believe that education benefits from technology - and it might benefit from things like open source ebooks - but making sure the classroom has wireless is a poor substitute for a teacher actually teaching, parents being involved with their kids (not on their own tablets), and kids "bravely" unplugging for a few hours a day to focus on learning.
Schools today babysit students for the state mandatory minimum hours before releasing them to the debt-prison that is college. :/
Yes, I'm jaded. :/
This weeks password is... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
so the routers in are a room that is easy to get to and in place where you can go up to one stat messing with it with no one to ask what you are doing?
how 'bout (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
playground? we had to get rid of recess due to NCLB
Provide money and guidance (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Because then all the money will go to the assistant principal's brother-in-law.
That's what oversight is supposed to be for... and if wishes were horses...
Re: (Score:2)
let them buy the approved technology they need
What if they don't need any technology, but instead need a new set of monkey bars for the playground?
Re: (Score:2)
The most honest answer I have (unfortunately) to your question is: "tough sh**". Too often, school funding comes with so many flipping strings attached it's sickening.
i.e. "We can't afford to fix the AC because that budget is dry, but the XYZ funding is overflowing, even though we don't need new XYZ this year. But we're not allowed to move money from the XYZ fund to the maintenance fund due to funding rul
Re: (Score:2)
Too often, school funding comes with so many flipping strings attached it's sickening.
An obvious solution would be to consolidate all federal education spending in a single department (maybe this would be a good job for The Department of Education). Then all the other departments can go back to doing their jobs. Why the hell is the FCC sticking its nose into school spending? Nonsense like this is why we have a $17 trillion national debt.
Re: (Score:2)
I've got a different take on the matter. As far as I know, the federal government exerts control over public education by taking money away from the states via taxation, and then only returning it if the states will teach in the manner seen fit by the Dept. of Education.
I.e., they use the ability of the federal government to tax anything and everything to circumvent
Re: (Score:1)
Who paid for this policy? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
Contracting here I come! (Score:2)
I am tired of solving virtualization challenges and figuring out how manage petabytes of data. I'm going to take the next couple of years off and setup a consulting company installing WAPs in schools. That is obviously where the money is at....
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not if you're installing the wiring in a school built in the 20's with masonry walls, no dropped ceilings, and flat arch clay tile floors.
Yes, exactly. Case in point, my daughter's arts and communications school (6 through 12) is a very old grade school (still has steam heat) that was repurposed as a charter school, and to wire the school for internet would require tearing so much down that it would have to be rebuilt anyway.
The thing about wifi is that it can be retrofitted with very little construction. In an older building, this matters.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
unfortunately you need to run cables to the access points. Wifi for large numbers is not the same as just plonking a single access point next to your phone/cable socket.
It's a matter of numbers. Enterprise grade wifi access points can support up to 200 users. A single hard wired connection is typically single user. (You could expand with switches, but then you've got exposed equipment and wires and are essentially making the teacher act as network administrator.)
With a physical wire difference of 200:1, wiring access points is a lot less intrusive.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
wifi for a large population say 600+ for a high school is going to be far more costly than a structured cabling roll out which is only $25/30$ per port
Depends on the building. Consider that many schools were built long before anyone thought you'd need to run wires for some new purpose that nobody had thought of at the time of construction.
Re: (Score:2)
Why is the FCC involved? (Score:2)
Building wide WiFi is not something the FCC really regulates. They put some standards on manufacturers to comply with but beyond that there is no interaction at the user level.
Furthermore, providing wifi is a state or city matter not a federal matter.
IF the FCC wants to help they can break up these monopolies and stop them from engaging in non-competitive behavior.
Otherwise the FCC can just go fuck themselves with a chainsaw.
Re: (Score:2)
Every bureaucracy tries to expand itself, you know that. Rather than actually get the bandwidth to schools that they need (200Kbps per student or so, ballpark) to support real telelearning, which is hard to do (but arguably within FCC purview), especially given the extensive number of rural schools, they lean towards something easy - buying access points, to hook up to their too-slow Internet link because every agency has to be seen "doing something".
Re: (Score:2)
which just tells you how poorly the federal government... especially the executive is being run these days...
Re: (Score:2)
Because they manage the fees paid for telecommunication services to be provided to areas where it's less profitable but necessary.
The thing is, the Internet is real. And the modern day student NEEDS access to the internet. But an alarming number of them only get access to it via the "free" hotspots at McDonalds and such - and kids nee