On July 8, our state legislators passed Senate Bill 3044, the Equity in Distance Learning Act, allocating $175 million in federal COVID-19 CARESact money for use by local schools. This money is to be spent to increase home access to distance learning for those who lack it due to rural location or low income. The funds can be used to purchase devices such as laptops and Wi-Fi hotspots, and can be also be used to purchase connectivity from internet service providers. As the Mississippi Department of Education (MDE) writes the rules for how the local school districts will spend this money and determines which vendors will be eligible for contracts, it should keep several key points in mind.

1. When it comes to internet access, guaranteed minimum speed is far more important than maximum possible speed. Students, educators, and their families need to be able to access their distance learning and online curriculum tools at full capacity any time of day and any day of the month. As explained before, The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has determined that 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload speeds are sufficient for distance learning, telemedicine, and telework, and that is why this regulatory body set these values as the threshold for defining “broadband.” Higher speed is not required for any online remote participation functions including streaming HD video, two-way teleconferences, webinar hosting or participation, etc. But lower speeds can indeed hamper these activities. Any provider contracted by MDE to deliver broadband services should have to guarantee a minimum speed of 25×3 Mbps at all hours of the day, all days of the month, including peak usage times such as the homework and night school hours of 6-10 pm. Advertised peak speeds are a distraction and mean little. Minimum speeds experienced during prime-time define the user experience.

2. Unlimited data is essential. For the same reasons as above, there can be no data caps that result in either additional charges or diminished service, such as speed throttling or being cut off.

3. Cellular Wi-Fi hotspots only work where there is good cellphone coverage. Many rural families in Mississippi today still cannot receive cellphone calls inside their homes. Cellular carriers are encouraging us to upgrade to 5G technology suited only for dense urban environments, even though 3G and 4G service better suited to Mississippi’s thick foliage and rolling terrain have to this day never been universally delivered. Not only will a cellular hotspot not work inside a home with weak coverage, buying them in bulk is tantamount to subsidizing an industry whose failure to deliver universal cellphone and broadband data access to rural areas has contributed to the digital divide and today’s inequity of access to distance learning and telemedicine.

4. For the most part it is lack of broadband connectivity to rural homes, not the lack of smart devices, that is the limiting factor for distance learning and telemedicine. Smart phones and tablet devices have largely saturated all income and age demographics, as K12 teachers and administrators trying to regulate their use on school campuses can attest. Mississippi schools have been buying Chromebook laptops for years, and many have already purchased enough to equip all their students who truly lack one at home. State hospitals, rural health care clinics, and many private healthcare providers are already well-equipped to provide telemedicine, but find that “last-mile connectivity,” not lack of devices, is what limits their efforts at delivering telemedicine to their rural patients.

5. Two cellular companies, C Spire and Sprint/T-Mobile, hold all the Mississippi license leases to a special frequency band ideally suited to rural broadcasting and set aside by President Kennedy in 1962 exclusively for rural education use. Instead of being used for education, the 2.5GHz Educational Broadcast System laid mostly dormant for decades until a recent rule change by the FCC allowed it to be used for mobile phones. The kindest thing to say is that treating this priceless radio spectrum as just another cellphone channel is a very suboptimal use of this high-power, tree-penetrating national asset. This frequency band is widely recognized as the “goldilocks” band for long-distance and high-data rate rural fixed wireless internet access. Like all of the radio spectrum, these frequencies belong to the American citizens, but these channels and broadcast sites in particular were entrusted for decades to the Mississippi Board of Education, the Community College Board, the Institute of Higher Learning, and the Mississippi Authority for Educational Television (MPB) to put them to educational use. It is well past time for these institutions to buy back these leases and finally deliver the Educational Broadcasting System in its modern form of a universal rural 2.5GHz public broadband network. Some other states have caught on and made these licenses available to existing wireless internet service providers, who can install off-the-shelf equipment to increase their broadcast power by a factor of 10 and instantly multiply the number of homes reachable from existing towers. This is a feasible and affordable path to Equity in Distance Learning.

If we were to treat this national quarantine as a genuine crisis and the health and education of our children as paramount, we would quickly muster the political will to bring all necessary parties to the table and rapidly deploy the state-wide distance learning and telemedicine solution that is within our reach. However, if we continue down the present track of political expediency, it will be a heartbreaking waste of millions upon millions of dollars poured into truckloads of the same stuff that has failed to solve this problem for decades.

Todd “Ike” Kiefer is president of the North Lauderdale Water Association. He is a Navy captain who joined the management team of East Mississippi Electric Power Association and the board of North Lauderdale Water association upon his retirement in 2013. He has a physics degree from the U.S. Naval Academy, a master’s degree in strategy from the Army Command and General Staff College, three years of Pentagon experience on the Joint Staff, seven combat deployments, and has been active in government relations, economic development, and researching solutions for rural broadband since 2014.