Page 24 - THE Journal, March 2017

FEATURE |Broadband
Current State of Broadband
in Schools
In 2014, the FCC adopted SETDA’s recommended targets for school Internet access:
At least 100 megabits per second (Mbps) per 1,000 users in the short term, which translates to 100 kilobits per second (Kbps) per student; and
At least 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) per 1,000 users in the long term, which translates to 1 Mbps per student.
Fast-forward to January 2017 when EducationSuperHighway released its second annual State of the States report, which examines broadband connectivity in K–12 schools based on data from the FCC’s E-rate program. According to
the latest report, 12 percent of school districts still don’t have the bandwidth they need. “We’re talking about the minimum connectivity necessary for school districts and students to be able to take advantage of digital learning and technology in the classroom, and that is 100 kilobits per second (Kbps) per student,” said Nell Hurley, director of marketing and communications at EducationSuperHighway.
However, the report found that 88 percent of school districts now meet the 100 Kbps per student goal — based on total bandwidth speeds for the district divided by the number of students — up from 76 percent in 2015 and 30 percent in 2013.
The Consortium for School Networking’s (CoSN) 2016 Annual Infrastructure Survey also shows significant improvement over the previous year. That report, released in August 2016, surveyed 567 district administrators across the country. Sixty-eight percent of districts reported that all of their schools fully met all of the FCC’s short-term broadband goals. However, 9 percent of respondents reported that none of their schools met those goals.
How Fast is Fast Enough?
The FCC’s short-term goal of 100
Kbps per student is meant to be a minimum, and schools really need to
be heading toward the long-term goal
of 1 Mbps per student, Hurley said. SETDA recommended that districts should achieve this target by 2017–2018. However, only 15 percent of school districts have attained that level of connectivity for all of their students, according to the 2016 State of the States report. And 54 percent of districts reported in CoSN’s 2016 Annual Infrastructure Survey that none of their schools meet that long-term goal.
How serious that problem is depends on who you ask. “School system leaders are divided on whether the [FCC’s] long- term goal is too ambitious or about right,” stated the CoSN report.
Those FCC targets originated from SETDA’s original Broadband Imperative
report released in 2012. With the release of The Broadband Imperative II in September 2016, SETDA refined its internet connectivity targets by differentiating between small, medium and large-sized districts. SETDA maintained the goal of at least 1 Gbps per 1,000 users (1 Mbps per student) as a 2017–2018 target for medium-sized districts, but it set out higher targets for small districts and lower targets for large districts.
“For small schools and districts, the minimum amount of bandwidth needed for basic administrative and automation functions makes up a substantially
larger percentage of all network usage,
so the per-user bandwidth required is substantially higher .... [A]s district size increases, the aggregate bandwidth needs can decrease,” the report stated.
Tracy Weeks, executive director of SETDA, stands behind the targets set out in The Broadband Imperative II. “One
of the ways we knew we were hitting
the right broadband recommendations were that some people thought they weren’t aggressive enough and some people thought that they were impossibly aggressive, so we knew we were hitting that nice sweet spot,” she said. “Shooting for that middle-sized district is, I think, the easier of the three targets to do.”
The targets for medium-sized school districts, as set out in The Broadband Imperative II, are at least 1 Gbps per
BROADBAND PLANNING RESOURCES
24
| MARCH 2017
Lack of affordability and access to fiber optic infrastructure are the two biggest barriers to meeting broadband targets. To help districts overcome those barriers, EducationSuperHighway has launched a tool called Compare and Connect K–12 (compareandconnectk12.org).
“A technology director can go onto that site, see how much they’re paying, see how much their neighbors are paying, and it’s a great negotiation tool for being able to call their service provider and get more bandwidth for the budget that they’re paying,” Hurley said.
CoSN also has resources available under the SEND focus area on its site (bit.ly/1eQNcjp), including guidelines for network design and a checklist for district network planning.