FCC to provide $2B for upgraded school wifi

Hi. I saw this since I track news/articles for GSA. Posted it on the UNBT RB folder, and thought I’d share it here. This seemed interesting and maybe for UBNT to play in?

http://fedscoop.com/gsa-joins-fcc-bring-wi-fi-schools/

“The Federal Communications Commission plans to distribute $2 billion in the next two years to modernize America’s schools’ with Wi-Fi connectivity through an expansion of its E-Rate program. To do so, the commission entered a partnership with the General Services Administration to deliver on that goal using the agencies’ purchasing power to reduce the cost of modernizing classrooms and libraries throughout the country.”

“…the BPAs would allow schools and libraries to utilize the GSA’s reverse auction platform to seek bids from equipment vendors at prices even better than those already available under the relevant GSA schedule,” Wilkins wrote. “Given that data in our record indicates that equipment makes up as much as 80 percent of the total cost of internal network deployment, this would provide a real opportunity for all schools and libraries to save…”

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This is a pretty standard thing, not everything the government does is stupid… Our school district is in a buying group with other school districts when we by school supplies we buy by the railroad car. Although these days it is probably a shipping container.

We belong to a self insurance liability pool and a health insurance buying group also. We try very hard to spend the taxpayers dollars well.