Rural Kids Face an Internet 'Homework Gap.' The FCC Could Help

While several slices of spectrum can carry mobile internet, the most promising for rural school districts is one the Federal Communications Commission first reserved for educational television broadcasts in the 1960s. Over three decades, the government gave away more than 2,000 spectrum licenses to school districts and education nonprofits, primarily in urban areas. But the FCC effectively stopped issuing such licenses in 1995, because many license holders weren’t using their spectrum, and instead making money by leasing it to commercial telecommunication companies. Nobody made a big fuss about the licensing freeze until 2004, when the FCC expanded the allowable use of this frequency band to include broadband internet and renamed it Educational Broadband Service. Suddenly, this sleepy spectrum became extremely valuable. But the freeze on new licenses remained, leaving huge swaths of the country without any legal access to EBS frequencies, areas collectively known as EBS “whitespace.” In recent years, pressure has built on the FCC to open up licensing in EBS whitespace—both from big telecoms eager to fortify their nationwide wireless networks and from tech-savvy educators hoping to spread their schools’ internet into students’ homes. Finally, in May, the FCC suggested lifting the whitespace licensing moratorium, among several proposals to change EBS.