Dive Brief:

• In the last of a three-part series, Education Week looks at how the FCC's E-rate program has drastically improved connectivity for 2,500 students in Mississippi's Calhoun County school district.
• The county had previously been billed $9,275 per month for a sub-par Internet connection on copper T1 lines.
• "The mere threat of new competition lit a fire under the district's previously unresponsive Internet providers," Superintendent Mike Moore told Education Week.

Dive Insight:

Moore says that his district needed muscle — in the form of federal backing — in order for local telecom companies to take the schools' needs seriously. "Until we talked about building our own line, I don't think [the companies] were serious," Moore told Education Week. "Washington gave us leverage."

Despite implementation problems and funding that is sometimes difficult for districts to obtain, E-rate appears to be working well overall.

According to a recent report from EducationSuperHighway, gaps in access to "minimally adequate bandwidth between rich and poor and rural and urban/suburban districts have largely been closed," and the median price of school web access is now $11/mbps.