FETC25: The State of E-Rate and How to Make the Most of It

School and library broadband technology has been through a lot in recent years, and so has the federal E-rate program that funds it. E-rate helped build broadband extensions to serve remote learners, had its definition expanded to accommodate new services and locations, and incurred several lawsuits as a result. But even as recent legal challenges and political appointments put its future in doubt, education leaders at the Future of Education Technology Conference in Orlando last week said the program has made strides against the digital divide and still stands to do more, given proper planning by school districts.

Leading a Jan. 14 session focused on updates to E-rate and planning for its future, Beverly Sutherland, president of the consulting firm EdTechnologyFunds Inc., started with a recap of recent history. She said the program was established in 1996, modernized in 2015 and now funds over $4.68 billion in services for schools and libraries each year.

While E-rate has traditionally paid for broadband and telecommunication services, the Federal Communications Commission adopted measures to expand the program twice in the last two years: to pay for Wi-Fi on school buses, adopted in October 2023; and for hot spot lending, adopted in July. The FCC also launched a $200 million pilot program in June that uses the Universal Service Fund, which funds E-rate, to support cybersecurity expenses for K-12 schools, with the idea that E-rate might eventually be expanded again to cover those costs. In December, the FCC announced it had received over 2,700 applications from schools in all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, totaling $3.7 billion in requests for cybersecurity support.

When the panel invited John Windhausen, executive director of the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition, to weigh in on how the Trump administration might impact these expansions, he was frank: all three are now at risk. He pointed out that the new FCC Chairman Brendan Carr voted against all three when he was just a commissioner, and their future will depend upon what happens when the open seat on the commission is filled.

“Technically if it’s a 2-2 commission, he can’t reverse these, because you need a majority vote,” Windhausen said. “But what we’re fearful of is that applicants are submitting their applications for school bus Wi-Fi, for hot spots, for cybersecurity, and he could put them on hold until he gets that fifth commissioner slot filled and then vote to try to reverse them.”

PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE

In the meantime, Jim Kerr, president of the software company E-Rate Profit Works, told attendees to take advantage of what he regarded as the two most under-utilized aspects of E-rate: firewalls and managed internal broadband services.

“If you’re a small applicant, you have 200 or 300 students at a school, and you’re the IT person, and you’re dealing with PC issues, everything else on your plate, there are vendors out there that will supply a network for you, manage it, operate it and monitor it, and do troubleshooting to a point where, under basic maintenance, they’ll dispatch a technician,” he said. “And they’ll do that under one contract.”

Kerr also gave his two cents about technology changes to come. Referring to designations of Wi-Fi infrastructure from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), he said Wi-Fi 6 is “done” and Wi-Fi 7 is in progress, which promised up to 24 Gbps connection speed but in reality delivers 8 or 9 Gbps. Kerr said commercial products handling Wi-Fi 8 are expected for E-rate in fiscal year 2028, and based on past experience, predictions that Wi-Fi 8 will deliver 100 Gbps speeds are probably, practically speaking, about four times what it will actually deliver.

More specifically, Kerr offered seven recommendations to K-12 schools modernizing their broadband infrastructure:

1. Use your E-rate Category 2 budget wisely, but use it.
2. Invest in fiber backbone.
3. Refresh the network if it’s more than six or seven years old.
4. If moving to Wi-Fi 7, do due diligence and don’t buy vaporware.
5. Invest in core switching. Buy the most horsepower you can afford.
6. Use E-rate for firewalls.
7. Consider Managed Internal Broadband Services (MIBS) for another way to use E-rate Category 2 funding. Some newer network-as-a-service companies will provide a five-year contract that includes a full network refresh and operational support that pays for itself.

Speaking from experience, Roger Zambrano, director of network engineering for the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE), said one of his biggest recommendations for IT departments is to build working relationships with the district’s cabinet, and specifically the financier.

“The reason for that is, at the end of the day they’re going to support you for making purchases for network equipment or not,” he said. “You have to build a long-term goal that’s not only attainable but realistic, and that’s an activity that we are going through in my organization now. As I advocate for more and more funding, often times in the past, they’ve been hit with, ‘Hey, I need X amount of dollars, and I need them now,’ right? Whereas now, we’re turning that around and saying, ‘I’m going to need it in three to four years.’ That’s a little more palatable for the finance folks to be able to fund and allocate in the future.”

Zambrano also advocated future-proofing wherever possible. As an example, he said LACOE recently laid new fiber and opted for 96-strand bundles instead of 24, because the cost of the fiber was negligible compared to the cost of the labor, so they saved money by not having to redo it when the next generation of technology arrives.

Lastly, he advised attendees at the session to be realistic about what their districts actually need, and build infrastructure that’s modular and scalable.

“There are a lot of things up and coming: esports, VR stuff, BYOD, all these things that require different security policies, different connections and so forth,” he said. “If you don’t have something that’s modular and allows you to add these features, your engineering team is going to have a hard time accommodating a lot of your requests.”