Remarks of FCC Commissioner Rosenworcel at the Hispanic Heritage Foundation

I want to talk about what I call the Homework Gap, the gap between homework that requires access to broadband, and households that do not subscribe to broadband service. There is no one single silver bullet or quick fix. It is going to take a lot of cooperative effort and a bunch of creative ideas. Here are mine.

The Lifeline program supports telephone access in 14 million low-income households across the country. But it needs a reboot. We need to modernize it. Instead of having the program only support voice service, we should allow participants to choose between applying the same support to either voice service or broadband service. This simple change would both update the program and help bring more broadband to low-income households with school-aged children. Second, we need more Wi-Fi. Third, we need to keep tabs on innovative broadband access programs all across the country -- and no shame, copy them. Thank you for your study today and thank you to everyone here for the terrific work you do to expand opportunity and access.