Robust fiber to the premise telecom infrastructure can help stem falling rural school enrollment

The Sacramento Bee reports today on rapidly falling enrollment in rural school districts in the Sacramento, California metro region.  I personally think we need help," Fred Adam, superintendent of Placer Hills Union and an executive committee member with the state’s Small School Districts' Association, told newspaper, adding, "I truly worry about the future.”

Behind the drop in enrollment, according to the Bee article, are an aging population and a declining birth rate. In rural areas, the article continues, these trends are magnified by a small employment base that has been further eroded by years of recession. With few jobs and fewer options, many families have moved to the suburbs or out of state to find work. "It's a pretty consistent story throughout California in rural communities," Adam is quoted as saying. "You can't compete with time and distance."

Yes we can.  It can be bridged by robust, Internet-based telecommunications services that can enable rural school districts to rely less on classrooms and the need to bus students to and from them, thereby reducing operating expenses.

How?  By facilitating what educators are calling blended learning.  Jeremy Meyers, deputy superintendent of the El Dorado County Office of Education (quoted in the Sacramento Bee story), recently wrote about the emerging educational method in which pupils do much of their learning and class projects outside of the classroom via the Internet – arguably the world’s biggest and best stocked library.  Back in the classroom, their teachers review their projects, answer questions and lead discussions. Authors William A. Draves and Julie Coates describe Web-based education as one of the nine defining trends of the 21^st century in the 2004 book Nine Shift: Work, Life, and Education in the 21^st Century.
 
Just as workshifting allows their parents to work part of the work week at the office, might someday soon students report to class on fewer days that the Industrial Age Monday through Friday schedule of the 20^th Century?  This is not to say the classroom is facing obsolescence, particularly for primary students where the classroom plays an important role in the development of social skills.  But for older kids who grew up in the connected world, blended learning makes lots of sense.

Key to making this possible is fiber to the premise telecommunications infrastructure that has the capacity to deliver information in all forms as well as enable video conferencing between students, parents and educators.  In order for that critical infrastructure to be put in place, communities must come together and find ways to finance its planning, construction and operation since the business models of existing telephone and cable companies cannot accommodate the telecommunications needs of less populous areas. 
 
A virtuous bonus of more robust telecommunications infrastructure is it would also better enable parents of school age children to work remotely and run home-based businesses.  That in turn would help keep them and their kids in the community and curb declining school enrollment.

California legislation would expand Internet infrastructure subsidy fund

Introduced February 22, California Senate Bill 740 boosts the size of the California Public Utility Commission's California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) infrastructure subsidy fund from $125 million to a maximum of $325 million and extends its life from 2015 to 2020.

Now if only the PUC would only make the CASF funding freely available to community fiber projects, it might actually achieve some real benefit for Californians, particularly those residing in areas lacking wireline Internet connections from incumbent telcos and cable companies.

N.M.’S Daunting Digital Divide | ABQ Journal

N.M.’S Daunting Digital Divide | ABQ Journal: If matching dollars from telephone companies that won stimulus grants are included, plus development loans from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service, broadband investments in the past five years surpass $400 million, according to the state Department of Information Technology.

But many of New Mexico’s rural zones still have no Internet coverage, and many that do are still using dial-up modems, or aging digital subscriber line (DSL) technology, said USDA Rural Development State Director Terry Brunner.

And don't expect Google to come in any time soon and build fiber to the premise infrastructure as it is doing in a single metro area, Kansas City.

“New Mexico still has a digital divide because in some areas it’s just so hard to go through mountains or rock formations, and then you get to the end of the route and find there just aren’t enough homes and businesses to pay for the construction,” said Valerie Dodd, CenturyLink Inc.’s vice president and general manager for New Mexico.

Not a valid explanation because it fails to take into account aerial fiber, using (and upgrading as necessary) the utility poles that deliver POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) via copper cable.

France undertakes public private partnership to build out fiber telecom infrastructure

France launches 20 bln euro fibre broadband rollout | Reuters: Feb 20

Three tranches of more than 6 billion euros each will fund the planned network rollout, Hollande said. One will come from network operators, one from a mix of operators and local government and the last from state and local-government money.

Local governments' outlay will be funded using tax-free, regulated deposits gathered by state bank Caisse des Depots.

By 2017, the end of President Hollande's first term, 50 percent of the country will be covered under the plan.

This clear implication here is telecom infrastructure build needs cannot be adequately funded purely by an investor-owned telecom market.

Study: Poor Online Video Quality Costly | Home Media Magazine

Study: Poor Online Video Quality Costly | Home Media Magazine: Global video content companies left as much as $2.16 billion on the table in 2012 due to poor online video streams, according to a new study.

San Mateo, Calif.-based video streaming company Conviva studied 22.6 billion video streams from 2012, and found approximately 60% experienced quality issues of one kind or another (20.6% impacted by buffering; 19.5% impacted by slow video startup time; 40% impacted by low-resolution picture due to low bitrates).

This item illustrates the significance of having Internet infrastructure capable of delivering quality video content.  Fiber to the premise remains the best current and future infrastructure for the job.

FCC looks into rural call completion problems - The Hill's Hillicon Valley

FCC looks into rural call completion problems - The Hill's Hillicon Valley: In a statement, Chairman Julius Genachowksi said the evidence of rural call completion problems is overwhelming.

"In too many towns across the country, the basic ability of all Americans to reliably receive phone calls — a bedrock of America’s communication policy — has come into doubt," he said. "This has serious economic, safety and other consequences."

The United States faces serious telecommunications service problems with 20 million Americans disconnected from premises Internet service and now voice phone service becoming spotty in rural areas.

In his State of Union address one year ago, President Obama pointed to the nation's "incomplete high-speed broadband network," calling on Congress to fund telecom and other critical infrastructure.  Let's see if the President revisits this continuing problem in this week's 2013 State of the Union address.

Outdated telephone regulation matches dominant obsolete telco infrastructure

Coalition says broadband means new jobs: SPRINGFIELD — Investments in broadband technology created more than 13,000 jobs in Illinois in 2010 and 2011, according to a study funded by AT&T.

The study also reported that in 2012, Illinois had almost 20,000 jobs related to mobile applications.

The study was released Thursday by a new coalition of 12 Illinois groups representing business and job creation proponents, taxpayer advocates and communications companies.

The new coalition — the Illinois Partnership for the New Economy & Jobs — formed to urge Illinois to modernize its telecommunications law.

“Illinois’ law mandates investment in the 100-year-old technology of wired telephones to your home,” said coalition chair David Vite, who is also president of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association. “Those dollars would be better used for private investment in broadband networks that are currently creating new jobs.”

The stated implication of this study is fallacious.  It assumes but for government regulations requiring telcos to maintain obsolete copper cable wireline infrastructure to provide required telephone services, incumbent telcos would be able to replace it with fiber optic plant delivering Internet Protocol (IP)-based services.  The outdated laws and regulations appropriately remain on the books because the outdated publicly switched copper POTS infrastructure remains the dominant infrastructure in most of the nation, much of it incapable of delivering any IP-based services.

FCC's gigabit goal will require significant public investment

FCC pushes for gigabit broadband in all 50 states by 2015 | Politics and Law - CNET News: The FCC hopes the Gigabit City Challenge will further these types of efforts. The FCC hasn't committed any funds to the "Gigabit Challenge," but the agency said it will help communities create an online clearinghouse of best practices to help educate local officials and local service providers on the most cost-effective ways to increase broadband deployments.

This will require the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service be sufficiently funded with grant and loan money to help communities meet the FCC's challenge with publicly and cooperatively owned fiber to the premises infrastructure.  Sharing best practices alone won't do the job considering the billions that will be needed to upgrade and replace America's obsolete copper cable infrastructure now being kept on life support with trash bags and baling wire.  In 2009, the FCC estimated it would take $350 billion to construct this needed infrastructure.