Most of America's libraries make it a part of their mission to offer Internet access to anyone in the community, but a severe bandwidth crunch is hobbling those efforts. That's one of the conclusions reached by the American Library Association, which says that 59.6 percent of American libraries "report their connectivity speed is inadequate some or all of the time to meet patrons' needs."
One of the problems is funding; in a recession, and especially a recession where housing prices (and therefore property taxes) are dropping in many communities, it can be hard to scrape the cash together for a library bandwidth upgrade.
But another problem is simple availability. As the ALA's report (PDF) points out, "moving from a 56Kbps circuit to 1.5Mbps is one thing. Moving from 1.5Mbps to 20Mbps or to 100Mbps or even to a gigabit—depending on the size and need of the library—is another." Even when they can pay for it, many libraries are finding that higher speeds simply aren't available.
The need for speed—and for cash
The report focuses on less-populated areas of the country, the sort of places that probably have DSL and basic cable Internet access, but may not see fiber to the node, fiber to the premises, or DOCSIS 3.0 speeds. In such areas, it may not be possible get more than a couple megabits per second, and that has a real effect on libraries that try to serve many patrons at once. As libraries (like my own) add WiFi access and more library users bring a laptop along, the problem only gets bigger.
"In more populated areas of the country, the transition [to truly high-speed infrastructure] is beginning to take place," says the document. "Fiber optic networks have the potential of meeting not only today's needs, but also those of the future. But, in other areas, that transition lags behind our capacity need."
Even when capacity is present, money is often not. Libraries and schools are eligible for universal service fund (USF) money through the FCC's E-rate program. They can use it to pay for certain telephone access, but the cash increasingly goes to fund broadband deployments. Despite the program's problems, the ALA praises its "remarkable success" at bringing at least some high speed Internet access into most US communities.
E-rate will underwrite between 20 and 90 percent of the costs of a school's connectivity requirements, depending on its financial situation. Many schools use the percentage of their students eligible for the National School Lunch Program as a measurement of need. The program puts a premium on funding landline, wireless, and Internet connectivity, which it calls "Priority 1" services, and secondarily on servers, routers, cabling, repairs, and funds for technical support—labeled "Priority 2" equipment.
The program's total payout was capped at $2.25 billion back in 1997, though, and has never been adjusted upwards, not even for inflation. That cap is about to be reached, which means that qualifying E-rate institutions could see less money or be denied applications soon.
The ALA insists that the program is crucial, saying that 96 percent of school districts now have teachers who assign homework that "requires use of the Internet." Once school closes for the day, kids without Internet access at home mostly get it from public libraries, which see their busiest hours in the late afternoon. According to the ALA, half of all American teenagers have used a library machine to gain access to the Internet.
The group therefore makes two recommendations to the FCC: raise the cap on the fund and "take the necessary steps to ensure that sufficient high-capacity broadband infrastructure is being deployed where necessary to ensure that the full promise of the E-rate program — the ability for all libraries and schools [to] have universal access to advanced telecommunications and information services — can be met."
Not that E-rate is without problems. Taking the money requires libraries and schools to install Internet filtering software for minors, and ALA says that 21.7 percent of all libraries didn't bother to apply for E-rate money "because of the need to comply" with this law.
And E-rate is a "pit of mystery" where standards and accountability have long gone to die (an ongoing problem with the various USF schemes).
reader comments
27