The Trump Administration announced that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is investing more than $29 million to provide broadband service in unserved and underserved rural areas in Oklahoma.
An estimated 650,000 South Carolinians don’t have high-speed internet access, making it nearly impossible go to a virtual class. So, as a temporary fix for that problem, schools have requested the state pay for internet access for 57,000 households for the upcoming school year mostly through mobile hotspots. Those requests are expected to increase as the academic year nears and parents decide whether to send their students to school for in-person instruction. The COVID-19 pandemic is shining a light on the lack of broadband access in some areas, especially rural communities.
It’s been just over a year since the Federal Communications Commission dropped the educational use requirement for the Educational Broadband Service (EBS) spectrum, saying most licensees weren’t deploying the spectrum for its intended use. Now, with thousands of students facing the possibility of another semester outside the classroom, schools that hold spectrum in the 2.5 GHz band are reconsidering its value.
CenturyLink CEO and President Jeff Storey said on the company's Q2 earnings call that he doesn't think things will return to pre-COVID 19 days, but there are now new opportunities. Storey said about 75% of CenturyLink's employees are currently working from home. He told CenturyLink's employees not to expect to return to their offices before early fall. CenturyLink will take a phased approach to employees returning to their office spaces. "Frankly, I don't expect we will ever return to the work from work approach we had prior to the pandemic," Storey said.
Inequities in local school systems because of a lack of funding, technology or parental involvement will be exacerbated by schools’ remote learning and hybrid plans in response to the rapidly spreading coronavirus. School districts that can afford it are trying to help. Some are giving or loaning laptops to students who don’t have them. Others are giving out Wi-Fi hotspots so that children can get online. Elsewhere, some teachers are calling students individually to help with assignments, or even dropping off textbooks and paper homework.
Across the rural US, more than 100 cooperatives, first launched to provide electric and telephone services as far back as the 1930s, are now laying miles of fiber optic cable to connect their members to high-speed internet. Many started building their own networks after failing to convince established internet service providers to cover their communities. But while rural fiber optic networks have spread swiftly over the past five years, their progress has been uneven.
As students throughout Kentucky prepare for a new school year and more remote learning amid a pandemic, the state should view internet access as a public good similar to electricity and school buses, several education and workforce leaders said. The issue of the Bluegrass State's "digital divide" was the focus of a briefing featuring former Kentucky education commissioner Wayne Lewis, State Sen.
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