Home Broadband Requirements: What is necessary for students (and families) during COVID-19 and beyond?

If we have learned anything during this pandemic, it is that access to broadband is now a social determinant of health, education, work, and economic security. What do we hope that our legislative and government agency leaders will consider?

1. Subsidies are critical. In order to reach low-income homes with high-quality broadband access essential for equally high-quality learning applications, subsidies to defray monthly recurring costs for households are an important consideration, with rural monthly subsidies necessarily higher than those for urban households.
2. Bandwidth standards for rural and urban settings will be unequal for the foreseeable future. Consider separate standards and aspirational goals for each, which means that standards for remote learning will be divergent as well (as well as standards for other engagements from home).
3. It isn’t just bandwidth. When making investments in networks to the home, consider other critical factors beyond download speeds: upload, latency and packet loss, and data caps.
4. The household is the denominator. We cannot simply talk about a single use (e.g., remote learning) in a home as the basis for a bandwidth standard. If we have learned anything during this COVID-19 experience, it is that concurrent use of the network -- several family members involved in different online pursuits simultaneously -- is the baseline for determining how much bandwidth is necessary.
5. Begin with what we have. Consider ways to leverage the existing installed telecommunications base (or funded projects in construction and deployment) in each region throughout the state. Bandwidth to the home will likely shape the kinds of remote learning applications possible for a given school district or districts, for colleges, and for other home applications (telehealth, work-from-home).
6. Build in accountability. Ensure we get what we are paying for. Require independent network performance testing.