20 Years of E-Rate
July 2, 2018 8:30 pm |The History of E-Rate
The E-Rate is part of the federal universal service program, a support mechanism that was created in 1934 to ensure that rural consumers had affordable phone service. Championed by a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators and Representatives and authorized under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, E-Rate provides public and private schools and public libraries with deep discounts on broadband, Internet access services, and internal Wi-Fi. In order to meet growing demand for E-Rate support, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) increased E-Rate’s annual funding cap to $3.9 billion in 2014. E-Rate funds are not appropriated but are fees collected (along with other universal service programs) from consumer phone bills.
Since its implementation in 1998, E-Rate played a major role in ensuring that nearly all K12 school classrooms had basic Internet connectivity. In 2014, the FCC approved its E-Rate Modernization Order, which sought to ensure that all schools and libraries have not just basic Internet connectivity but sufficient bandwidth for students and patrons to make use of the wealth of educational resources, tools and services available online. To meet this goal, the FCC focused E-Rate funding on ensuring that all schools and libraries meet high bandwidth benchmarks for robust Wi-Fi connectivity. An Education Superhighway study showed that schools are already making significant progress on improving classroom Wi-Fi connections, with the percentage of classrooms meeting Wi-Fi connectivity targets growing from 30% in 2013 to 88% in early 2017. Further, after receiving virtually no internal connections funding since the beginning of the program, libraries received $10 million for Wi-Fi in 2016.
The 2014 E-Rate Modernization Order also opened new opportunities for rural and remote schools and libraries to gain access to high-speed external fiber connections by allowing them to receive E-Rate support for special construction charges and modulating electronics associated with leasing dark fiber, and for building and owning their own high-speed networks. The Order also encouraged improved school and library external connections by allowing them to receive additional support from the E-Rate program when their states contribute additional support for broadband. Recent surveys suggest that these changes coupled with increased pricing transparency have helped lower bandwidth costs from an average of $22/mbps in 2013 to $7/mbps in 2016.
Categorised in: eRate Service
This post was written by Dan Burns
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