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

[Commentary] In the months leading up to President Barack 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.”

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, which 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. 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. 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.