Creating an Emergency Connectivity Fund to Outlast the Pandemic

The recently-approved American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) allocated $7.171 billion to a new Emergency Connectivity Fund (ECF), an historic expansion of the E-rate program to connect students, teachers, and library patrons who lack home broadband access. As the SHLB Coalition proposed in a Remote Learning Petition, the ECF will fund broadband connections and devices off-campus, setting it apart from traditional E-rate dollars. The SHLB Coalition believes the FCC should create an ECF program that focuses on long-term connectivity solutions so that those without home broadband today can stay connected long after the pandemic subsides. After all, even when physical buildings reopen, students and patrons will need the internet off-campus to do homework and research. We also suggest that the ECF should complement, rather than duplicate, the Emergency Broadband Benefit program, which aims to provide short-term relief for low-income households. In our ECF comments, SHLB proposed several recommendations that will allow broadband deployment “to and through” a school or library building to reach the surrounding community. While hotspots can solve student connectivity woes quickly in some areas, many regions cannot support these devices. This is where deploying new fiber and wireless networks “to and through” schools and libraries would come in handy, by encouraging anchor institutions to build out new networks to reach the home, using, for example, new and affordable wireless technologies.


Creating an Emergency Connectivity Fund to Outlast the Pandemic