America, here's what the FCC's Rosenworcel REALLY thinks about your broadband

Re: A more pertinent question

I managed to do my high school computer work on a TRS-80 Model I with a cassette drive, and it was the only computer in the entire school, but that's irrelevant.

What's relevant is a lot of teachers want you to email your assignment, or they will email you requirements or forms they want you to use.

Because most teachers are complete technology retards (and are proud of themselves about it) some of these items are megabytes in size, and even if you have some crap old PC, a 2400 baud modem doesn't cut it.

Re: A more pertinent question

@P.Lee, I didn't give you a thumbs down, but like the next poster I think you missed the point which is the lack of education of the teachers. Using on-line resources like Wikipedia can be well accomplished using even dialup. You're right though about the disingenious focus on layout and the like.

Nevertheless, I think that the pertinent question would rather be, why don't these people have an internet connection of any kind? Slow, or otherwise. To me the explanation would likely be one of two. One, the incumbents will not spend money on getting a connection to less profitable areas. Or, two, people are not educated in the ways of affording a connection. Those that have only POTS available are, of course, not easily served. But those that have cable or DSL or rural wireless available in the area, can drop their $30-50 per month telephone and put it on an internet connection with very little, if any, additional cost per month. This works for my slow rural wireless connection where I'm using world class VoIP from Callcentric, so I'm not talking theory here.

To me the issue that should be addressed by the Lifeline program is actual access being provided by the Telcos. Internet cost in existing areas is probably a red herring. These users likely already have a redundant telephone bill (as described above) or perhaps an addictive attachment to an even higher priced TV access which they are prioritizing over internet access.

Re: without a lawsuit?

The only reason for there to be a lawsuit is because the FCC won't work with Congress to pass legislation. Only Congress has the authority to pass this sort of legislation. It is well past time for non-Congressional entities to stop pretending otherwise.

Re: If

>>roughly seven out of ten teacher homework assignments require internet access"

>>then seven out of ten homework assignments are failing to educate our students

>>and that's not a problem the FCC can solve.

When I was growing up back in the last millennium, my school had a pretty fair library and I could walk to a university library and use their stuff, even if I couldn't check it out. The problems are (1) the students who live in communities that don't have good library facilities and (2) the topics that aren't available in whatever libraries are available. The alternative to an Internet search may be selecting from a much more limited number of topics and having less breadth of material.

(We're talking United States) If the topic of a research paper is the early life of Abraham Lincoln, along with the general characteristics of the times, there probably won't be material in the local library. But there might be what she/he needs on the Internet if sufficient searches can be done. And searching the Internet is a valuable skill with so much available there--and the skill is only developed with practice. (That's something I try to explain to my wife, when she asks me to search for something for her. Give a man a fish...teach the man to fish...)

I was fortunate when I was teaching there were several "open" computer labs the students could use to do their homework in whatever subjects they had. Often the smaller public schools won't have the extra labs/computers availablel and even more frequently, the budget is such that there won't be funding to keep the labs open after school.