The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is investing more than $2 million to provide broadband service in unserved and underserved rural areas in North Carolina. This investment is part of the $100 million Congress allocated to the ReConnect Program through the CARES Act.In rural North Carolina, Randolph Telephone Membership Corporation will use a $2.3 million grant to deploy a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network to connect 3,333 people, 17 farms, 26 businesses and nine educational facilities to high-speed broadband internet in Moore County.

As students across the country start school, education experts reckon with the long-term implications of remote learning, vanishing resources, and heightened inequality.

Sen Mark Warner (D-VA) led 10 other senators in calling on the seven largest internet service providers (ISPs) to do their part to limit the economic and social disruption caused by COVID-19 and help ensure that children are able to meaningfully participate in their education. These letters come as unprecedented numbers of students rely on remote learning to kick off the fall semester due to the ongoing public health crisis. 

In a letter sent to the CEOs of AT&T, CenturyLink, Charter Communications, Comcast, Cox Communications, T-Mobile, and Verizon, the senators called on companies to take concrete measures to suspend limits and fees associated with increased broadband use, which is needed to participate in online courses or remote work. They also called for the companies to expand coverage areas, as the public health emergency has highlighted the devastating impact of the nation’s lingering broadband gaps. In their letter, the senators noted numerous complaints that have come in to their offices from parents and educators who are grappling with usage caps and limited bandwidth, which prevent daily video calls needed to learn and work from home. The senators also stated they’ve heard of families being deemed ineligible for the new services offered for low-income families due to previous missed payments. 

Ensuring all US households have high-speed internet will help provide similar education opportunities to students at different income levels, particularly during the pandemic, Democrats said. “Education justice involves giving everybody the same access to information,” said Rep. Donna Shalala (D-FL). The digital divide exacerbated by the pandemic “is about opportunity” and needs to be narrowed, said Rep Shalala. “We need a national policy of 100 percent of our households online,” said Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. “No individual, household, or community is going to have a fair shot at success in the 21st century without it.” Margaret Spellings, who was secretary of Education during the George W. Bush administration, also expressed concern about the amount of attention to the educational divide by officials at all levels of government, saying “we are at risk of losing a generation of kids.”

If we want to make any progress on [connecting Americans] during hurricane season, then we need Congress to pass the “Reenforcing and Evaluating Service Integrity, Local Infrastructure, and Emergency Notification for Today’s Networks — or RESILIENT Networks — Act.” Congress should pass the RESILIENT Networks Act as quickly as possible. Neither the Federal Communications Commission nor state governments have taken the needed steps to update our regulations governing repair of physical networks to reflect modern network construction. The biggest change — that communications networks are no longer self-powered — requires that the FCC and the Department of Energy (through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) work together to require power companies and telecommunications companies to coordinate. That takes federal legislation. But we also need to recognize that we can’t require every network to maintain reliability on its own. We need networks to use the redundancy that comes from having competing networks to provide the reliability we used to have from a highly regulated monopoly provider.

Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel is widely considered among the frontrunners to lead the FCC under a Biden administration. Protocol spoke with Commissioner Rosenworcel about whether the process around President Donald Trump's social media executive order has become corrupt, why she thinks FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is dropping the ball when it comes to helping students get internet access, and what she thinks a Democratic administration should prioritize on tech policy.

When asked, "Chairman Pai says it's simply not within the FCC's jurisdiction to change E-Rate [to expand access outside of classroos] because of how the law is written. What's your response to Pai on that?" Commissioner Rosenworcel said, "That's just an excuse. It's not right. The law has a reference to classrooms, but it also has provisions that suggest we can make adjustments in order to facilitate the underlying purpose, which is to get kids connected to school. Moreover, the FCC has forbearance authority, which it uses on behalf of companies every other week. Why wouldn't we use that same authority to make sure that we get our nation's kids connected? We can fix the homework gap, we can address digital equity with some modest adjustments to our programs. Our refusal to do so is cruel. We keep looking the other way. We're tying ourselves up in bureaucratic knots to help prevent kids all across this country get connected and actually go to school. Shame on us. There's nothing in the law that prevents us from making the adjustments right now."