San Jose Mercury News

Although the city of San Jose has neither authority nor budgetary responsibility over our 19 school districts, the city has a moral responsibility to support their critical work. Among the city’s many educational initiatives, it committed to close the digital divide in San Jose by launching the Digital Inclusion Partnership last year, to build digital skills and expand broadband access.

The COVID-19 pandemic’s emergence and exponential spread has highlighted the mission-critical nature of residential networks. Home networks are now lifelines, connecting us to colleagues, customers, co-workers, patients and investors, not to mention friends, family and entertainment. Many more people would be unemployed or be contributing less to the economy if not for this connectivity. Data shows that demand for downlink bandwidth in areas affected by the pandemic have risen on average by 30% and uplink bandwidths by 50%-100%.

The current global response to COVID-19 would not have been possible without telecommunications. But we need more innovation in telecommunications to build the medical infrastructure we need to deal with pandemics. society will need tools to better prepare for future pandemics that can arrive more frequently and be even more deadly than COVID-19. Possible ideas include:

As we wrap our heads around the new normal of sheltering in place and trying to care for those in our communities that are truly devastated by COVID-19, the technologies that connect us – from the internet to wireless to GPS – are now the first line of contact and defense for nearly everything we do. Information and communications technologies have created a remarkable ability to connect, inform, work remotely and innovate. While these capabilities benefit the world in a wide range of ways, their benefits are not distributed equally.

In 2012, California decided to deregulate the broadband internet industry until 2020 with the aim of encouraging greater consumer choice, economic growth and innovation. Eight years later, these benefits have not materialized. Instead internet providers have taken advantage of deregulation to increase prices and evade oversight. Now internet providers are pushing Assembly Bill 1366, which would extend this disastrous policy for another decade.