Remember the heady days after President Obama's ConnectED speech? Senator Rockefeller was talking about putting an extra $billion or so into the fund annually, and the administration was talking about putting an extra $5/phone into the program.
What happened to the idea that ConnectED (or E-Rate 2.0 or whatever) was to be an expansion of the program? In his latest statement before Congress, Chairman Wheeler only touched on the level of funding by saying that the program must be "fiscally responsible."
The Chairman did recently say that he "will not hesitate" to increase the size of the fund "should this be warranted." But then he goes on to explain why it's not warranted.
100 Mbps to every school and Wi-Fi in every classroom is going to cost something like $3.1 billion or $6.8 billion per year. So if the FCC stands up to the howls from applicants and tosses everything else out and saves $600 million, we're still billions short. Time to double the fund already.
It looks like I wasn't the only one with this thought:
ReplyDeletehttp://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=7521151904
"We cannot wait any longer to increase E-Rate support."
Just don't keep reading, because they endorse the 1-in-5 Rule later in the letter.