Dear FCC: What is Wi-Fi Without Greater Capacity?

In the months leading up to President Obama’s announcement of the ConnectED Initiative (which happened a little over a year ago now), Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel spoke about reforming the E-rate program at the Washington Education Technology Policy Summit and said we needed bandwidth capacity goals for schools and libraries. She declared that “before the end of the decade, every school should have access to 1 Gigabit per 1000 students.”

This big connectivity goal underscored that in order to really support digital learning students don’t just need Internet access, they need high-speed Internet access. But that was then.

Last week, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler released his draft order for E-rate modernization, and we’re now seeing a shift in priorities—what started as a commitment to high speed connectivity has shifted to a promise of wireless connection. Splitting up that $2 billion down payment on connectivity he announced earlier this year over 2015 and 2016, the Chairman has committed to supporting Wi-Fi to connect 10 million students (or 1 in 8 school-aged students in the U.S.).

While closing the Wi-Fi gap is a laudable goal given many schools lack sufficient wireless capacity, it’s important to note that the question of capacity and the language around speed goals and targets has taken a backseat. What Commissioner Rosenworcel identified as critical to program reform, Chairman Wheeler has now put aside for Wi-Fi.

To recap, the Chairman’s draft order highlights three main objectives:

1. Closing the Wi-Fi gap for schools and libraries, while phasing down support for non-broadband services
2. Making current funds go further by cutting back the matching fund ratio, as well as increasing transparency on how funds are currently spent
3. Update program administration processes to make the program faster, simpler, and more efficient

The reactions to this proposal so far have been mixed, and one of the biggest flashpoints is the failure to permanently increase funding to what is already an oversubscribed program. As Ed Week reported on Friday, Brian Lewis, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education, characterized the lack of secure funding as a “step backward,” noting that “instead of placing this invaluable but cash-strapped program on sound financial footing for the next decade, this draft order rests its laudable proposals ... on very shaky ground." (The funding cap for the E-rate Program has not been increased—only adjusted for inflation—since the program was introduced back in 1996.)

While Lewis and others are right to point out that this draft order rests its proposals on very shaky ground, the weakness is due to more than budget uncertainty—it also rests upon schools and libraries’ shaky broadband infrastructure.

Wi-Fi generally refers to the delivery of Internet service through the airwaves, as opposed to a cable plugged into your device. What you have to understand about Wi-Fi, however, is that while your device may be wireless, in order to access the Internet your router still has to be plugged into a high-speed wired connection. More routers means more devices can get online at the same time, but it does not mean the service will be any faster unless you also upgrade the underlying connectivity. Thus, a school replete with Wi-Fi connectivity but only 50 Mbps connectivity per 1,000 students will not be leveraging up-to-date educational technology any time soon.

This is why Commissioner Rosenworcel, President Obama, and countless other organizations have pointed toward more ambitious reforms to meaningfully modernize the E-rate program. At New America, our Education Policy Program and Open Technology Institute have jointly endorsed speed targets, and further lent our support to calls for an Upgrade Fund that would enable schools and libraries to update their broadband infrastructure. Specifically, we have argued that it’s critical to upgrade networks to fiber, given that it is the technology best capable of delivering sufficient high-speed access.

The three objectives laid out by Chairman Wheeler are necessary, but hardly sufficient for program modernization. If integrated into a broader set of necessary reforms, E-rate will enable students to connect to the future of learning. As is, the draft order may just be providing students with wireless access to the same substandard Internet service.