Dive Brief:

• In part two of a three-part series on school Internet connectivity, Education Week looks at "astronomical" broadband pricing holding back rural New Mexico schools.
• Schools like New Mexico's Datil Elementary have just 17 students in K-6, and larger telecom companies won't provide service, leaving small companies to set their own rates.
• Because of a lack of both infrastructure and competition, schools are charged thousands of dollars every month for subpar connections, and FCC policies aimed at mitigating the problem, like the "Connect America Fund," contain loopholes allowing telecom providers to ignore districts falling outside of their current coverage area. 

Dive Insight:

The FCC's E-Rate program and Connect America Fund are supposed to help rural schools defray connectivity costs, but in cases like the sparsely-populated Quemado school district profiled by Education Week, they don't actually help much. That's because, Education Week reports, "...More than half of rural districts reported that only one Internet provider operates in their area, resulting in a shortage of qualified bidders willing to help them get connected."

Evan Marwell, EducationSuperHighway's CEO, said that the schools are "pretty much at the mercy of whatever local phone companies want to charge them” due to a lack of competition.

Regulatory weaknesses and a lack of oversight also play a role. "Within the past decade, more than $200 million in federal stimulus funds, plus millions more from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, have been spent in New Mexico alone on efforts to extend high-speed broadband networks to rural areas," the story concludes. "But state officials here, as elsewhere, now say they don’t know where much of that privately owned fiber is."

The efficacy of the federal E-Rate program has met skepticism since before its launch, with critics pointing out huge costs and a dearth of computers and other tech devices needed in classrooms to actually access the internet. Jeff Patterson, the founder of Gaggle, compared the E-Rate program to "a utility that builds new infrastructure for water transport without securing the water needed first."

Some rural schools have turned to alternatives like satellite connections as a solution. EducationSuperHighway's recent 2015 State of the States report also highlighted price-gouging by telecoms, and CEO Marwell encouraged districts to negotiate in order to secure the lowest possible cost, and to also join forces with neighboring districts for greater bargaining power.