Ninety-nine percent of America’s schools now have high-speed broadband connections capable of providing enough bandwidth to enable their students and teachers to use technology in the classroom. 46.3 million students and 2.8 million teachers in 83,000 schools have the Internet access they need for digital learning. This success is due to the collaborative effort of governors in all 50 states along with federal policymakers, service providers and school districts. These key stakeholders came together with the common goal of increasing bandwidth to allow students to truly take advantage of the educational possibilities that come with digital learning, and the progress is already paying off. 93 percent of school districts are using digital learning in at least half of their classrooms every week and 85 percent of teachers and principals support the increased use of digital learning in their schools. More highlights from the report:

• The number of students who have access to broadband at the Federal Communications Commission’s original goal of 100kbps per student has increased from 4 million in 2013 to 46.3 million today.
• The median cost of Internet access for schools has declined from $22 per Mbps to just $2.25 since 2013.
• Since 2015, school districts have invested nearly $5 billion in K-12 Wi-Fi networks.
• 99 percent of America’s K-12 public schools have the fiber-optic connections needed to meet future connectivity needs.

A Q&A with Benton Senior Fellow Gigi Sohn.

When you have four [competitors in the wireless marketplace], you had a situation where T-Mobile was not only competing with AT&T and Verizon and changing their behavior, but it was also competing with Sprint and Sprint with it for the low-value customer. Once you shrink that to three evenly sized companies, the incentive to go after the low-value customer goes away because you’ve gotten rid of Sprint, who is keeping your prices down. And we’ve seen this in many markets in Europe. The incentive becomes to act more like AT&T and Verizon and raise prices and not have as family-friendly plans. And in fact, the record at the FCC shows that this is exactly what would happen. The prices would go up. Now the companies say, “Yeah, well, you’re right. Prices will go up, but you’ll get more for your money.” But where does that leave the value-conscious customers? Maybe they don’t want to pay 15 dollars more a month or whatever. I think it said between 15 and 21 percent more a month. Maybe they don’t want that super speedy service. So what happens to them? Again, the problem is, as we’ve seen over and over again in four-to-three markets, prices go up, and people are left out in the cold.

Sens. Mark R. Warner (D-VA), Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced the Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching (ACCESS) Act, bipartisan legislation that will encourage market-based competition to dominant social media platforms by requiring the largest companies to make user data portable – and their services interoperable – with other platforms, and to allow users to designate a trusted third-party service to manage their privacy and account settings, if they so choose. The Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching (ACCESS) Act would increase market competition, encourage innovation, and increase consumer choice by requiring large communications platforms (products or services with over 100 million monthly active users in the U.S.) to:

• Make their services interoperable with competing communications platforms.
• Permit users to easily port their personal data in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format.
• Allow users to delegate trusted custodial services, which are required to act in a user’s best interests through a strong duty of care, with the task of managing their account settings, content, and online interactions.