benton's blog

National Broadband Plans:
From Vision to Strategy to Execution

Speech As Prepared for Delivery

Thank you for inviting me to share in this important event on the Qatar National Broadband Plan.

We’re here to discuss the choices Qatar should make as to its broadband ecosystem. I thought I’d start by noting how different this is from many other policy debates.

Distributing the Future;
Which Children Will We Leave Behind?

Blair Levin
Aspen Institute
Communications and Society Fellow

Nevada Broadband Summit
November 18, 2013

Today, I will focus on the biggest issue the FCC will face in how it upgrades the E-Rate program; whether all American school children will soon be able to take advantage of transformative digital education or whether that opportunity will only be available to some, with millions left behind for years, if not decades, to come.

Today, the average American school has about the same bandwidth as the average American home, even though there are 200 times as many people at school as there are at home. Only around 20 percent of our students have access to true high-speed Internet in their classroom and fewer than 20 percent of educators say their school’s Internet connection meets their teaching needs. By comparison, in South Korea 100 percent of students are connected to high-capacity broadband.

[Editor’s note: In this week’s round-up, new Headlines Writing Associate Rebecca Ellis looks at a significant media policy decision from Argentina that did not get much press here in the U.S. Looking at international coverage in English and Spanish, Ellis offers a take on the Supreme Court of Argentina’s ruling that upholds a new law that limits media ownership concentration.]