Broadband Internet is Critical to Learning – Getting it to Everyone is the Difficult Task

One of the first lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic was the value of the broadband^[1] internet to our education system.  While there was a massive amount of retooling (new applications to learn, new technologies to master, new teaching methods to adapt to), the existence of the broadband made the transition possible except that it did not work for an important sector of the population.

A 2018 report by the Brookings Institution showed that the penetration of the internet to individual households is not universal.  In the Bronx, NY, penetration was between 75% and 80% in 2018, on a par with Milwaukee, WI.  Many rural counties had more than a third of their populations without service.  In one Alabama town, only two people had service.  Many rural schools and some urban ones provide Wi-Fi in the parking lot or playgrounds for students without service at home.

Brookings in 2020 reported, “COVID-19 has revealed that the emperor is still without clothes as more than 12 million of 55 million students who were sent home at the end of March did not have home broadband access. Parents and educators found themselves in the parking lots of libraries, schools, and open business establishments to use their public Wi-Fi networks^[2].” This shortfall presents a challenge to School Boards and Community Leaders across the country.

There are rural areas of the country where the internet is limited or just not available, full stop.  There are urban areas where buildings are not wired and where the internet prices are unaffordable.  I would suggest that we might need an “Affordable Internet Act” from congress, but I am not sure my humor would be appreciated on either side of the aisle.  Several efforts have tried to address this issue. For example, in the CARES Act, there is E-Rate support but not enough funding; many are arguing that it’s going to take upwards of $100-250 billion to effectively tackle the digital divide that will impact schools into the fall.

First, we need to be clear.  Having broadband internet access for students, households, schools, and libraries is necessary, but not sufficient to provide for learning in the post COVID world.  It is also necessary, but not sufficient for many businesses who are discovering that productivity is high for remote workers.  Not having broadband speed makes online learning and remote working extraordinarily difficult and significantly reduces productivity. 

In short, it is a critical supporting technology, and it must work.  Teachers, students, and their parents must know how to use it. There must be coaching and support to help everyone overcome their difficulties.  Unfortunately, we read about cases where kids who gave up were deemed truants, and their parents were reported to human services agencies as negligent, which is a punishment rather than an offer of assistance.  

If you are in a school district that already has broadband service to many homes, count yourself as fortunate.  If you do not, you should start by researching the existing internet service providers in your community or county and discovering the hurdles to overcome in making it available to all student homes.

Second, the internet was designed to be resilient.  Its distributed nature, without central management, is designed to work under extreme stress.  Chokepoints?  No problem!  Instantaneous rerouting! 

The internet’s strength is also its weakness when it comes to you getting your arms around it.  It uses diverse technologies.  It is a distributed network, owned and operated by an equally distributed network of companies, coops, utilities, municipalities, and not-for-profits.  The backbone technology includes fiber, coax, and microwave.  The local distribution can be on twisted copper pairs, coax, fiber, wireless, satellite starting in late 2020, and eventually 5G wireless.  Local network service providers may or may not be interested in either the quantity, the priority, or the content of what traverses their portion of the network.  It is essential to learn if educational network traffic will be given adequate priority for reliable service for all your classes and students. 

If the “last mile” distribution to homes is wired (copper, cable, or fiber), then it is either above ground on poles (who owns the poles?) or below ground (who has the easements?).  These questions are important if you are in a city with complex road crossings for utilities.  And then there is the in-premises distribution, which can be CAT-5 or CAT-6 cable, Wi-Fi, or other wireless, which are considerations if many of your students are in apartment complexes.  Yikes!

To cite a recent successful statewide internet example in 2009, the State of New Hampshire applied federal grant money to extend broadband internet to all schools, municipal buildings, and libraries in the State.  The project took about three and a half years.  It involved county governments, town governments, school boards, library boards (some libraries are public but privately owned), backbone internet companies, local network service providers, telecom and electric utilities, cabling contractors, and on and on. 

In each jurisdiction, it was possible that the combination of players would be different,  although there were a few more popular combinations.  Just keeping track of the contracts was complex.  The towns were rural, especially in the northern counties, but urban and suburban in the southern part of the state.  The project was managed by the University of New Hampshire’s IT organization, fulfilling some of its public service mandate.  At the time of the awarding of the funding for the project (part of a $4.7 billion federal program) studies estimated that the grant amounted to about 2% of what would be needed to provide broadband connectivity to all homes and businesses in the country.

The POPULARITY OF INTERNET AND THE DIVERSITY OF OFFERINGS IS your friend – it lets you chunk the solution INTO TASKS THAT ARE EASIER FOR YOU TO ACCOMPLISH

We need a national mandate to make broadband available to all households.  Call it “Net-fair,” or the “Affordable Internet Act,” or “The 21^st Century Last-Mile Marathon”.  The mandate to extend broadband to all students, all households, and all schools sounds like the right thing to do.  But executing that mandate is a monumental undertaking.  Hopefully, your state already has Network Service Providers offering Broadband services that reach every corner of your State. Now your New Endeavor’s challenge is to be sure all students and teachers can obtain the service in their homes, know how to use it, and importantly can afford it.

The Prometheus Endeavor thinks that your New Endeavor to bring Broadband Internet to all teachers and students will be easier to do if you chunk it into pieces, each of which will be easier and less risky to accomplish. Our view is that the 100% coverage mandate should be viewed as a long-term goal, with funding and guidance, and chunks that can be implemented with immediate benefits. 

The New Hampshire example shows approaches that worked for them.  The focus in New Hampshire on the schools, the municipal buildings, and the libraries provided a limited chunk of work that would have a relatively quick payoff and would lead to the extension of the backbone network throughout the state.  It also provided for the installation of mountain top cell towers to extend wireless internet to locations previously not covered.  It would give each of the towns and counties the option to extend the network out to individual households and businesses.  These extensions could be done by coops, utilities, municipalities, or others.  We applaud the state’s creativity in leadership, network design, and deployment, reaching even the most remote communities.  However, in New Hampshire, as in all States and many communities, the effort of extending the network to the homes of all students and teachers remains. 

We think anyone looking to extend their information infrastructure should ask the questions that we at Prometheus Endeavor ask:

What is the context? – What is driving the need for change?  What are the symptoms that have led this to be front-and-center?  Is your challenge “the last mile” to all students and teachers?

What is your Endeavor?  – Have you chunked the size of your New Endeavor down to the point that you can accomplish something with realizable results?

What are your resources? – Do you have the funding you need?  Do you know how to find and apply for State or Federal grants? Do you have the talent you need?  Do you have access to these resources?  Have you researched the existing Network Service offerings in your area?

Who are your stakeholders? – Are they the students, their parents, their teachers, the school administration, the union, the municipality, the school board, the utilities?  Do many homes already have service?  What support and training are needed?  Do you have special needs (e.g., personal limitations, economic hardships, or special needs support, coaching, and assistance in the home for children at home)? 

How can you learn from your experience?  – Have you designed your Endeavor to take small risks at the beginning and to re-calibrate based on your experience?  Will each of your stakeholders be able to adapt to the Endeavor and the changes required?

What are the risks? – Have you managed a project of this complexity before?  Are you using technologies that are unfamiliar to your team, or the world?

How will you govern the process?  – Who will you answer to?  What do they expect as an outcome?  How will you manage those relationships?

Broadband Internet is critical to learning. Getting it to everyone is a difficult task. After answering these questions, planning your Endeavor will be a little easier, and promises to be more rewarding for you when you have accomplished your goals.

About The Prometheus Endeavor
Our mission is to apply our knowledge and management experience to further the IT and Digital Endeavors of society, its institutions, and businesses. The Prometheus Endeavor does not do consulting or represent vendors. For over 30 years, members have advised and managed some of the most successful deployments of IT.

[1] Definition: Broadband internet means a level of service with enough capacity for full motion video, i.e. starting at 1.6 megabits per second ranging up to 300 or even 1000 megabits.  The higher bandwidths have much higher subscription costs.

[2]  https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2020/07/28/for-schools-to-reopen-congress-must-include-broadband-funding-in-the-stimulus-bill/