Universal Service Fund Research Articles

Professional Development in Integrating Technology Into Teaching and Learning: Knowns, Unknowns, and Ways to Pursue Better Questions and Answers

The literature base on technology professional development for teachers reveals that there is a long way to go in understanding methods of effective practice with respect to the various impacts of these activities on teaching and learning. In the No Child Left Behind era, with programs like Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology, the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education, and E-rate (the schools and library portion of the Universal Service Fund) that have been targeted as No Demonstrated Results, we need to move to a more systematic study of how technology integration occurs within our schools, what increases its adoption by teachers, and the long-term impacts that these investments have on both teachers and students. In addition to the findings of a comprehensive literature review, this article also articulates a systematic evaluation plan that, if implemented, will likely yield the information needed to better understand these important educational issues.

Assessing Broadband in America: OECD and ITIF Broadband Rankings

The United States continues to fall behind in adoption, ranking 15th among 30 OECD nations according to the latest installment of the organization's semiannual survey of subscribership. The number of U.S. subscribers per 100 people grew to 19.6 in December 2006, up 0.4 percentage points from 19.2 in June 2006, a growth rate far below the 2.0 percentage point OECD average. Many of the leading European countries - including Denmark, Netherlands, Iceland, Switzerland, and Norway - continue to pull away from the pack with faster adoption rates. When the OECD first collected this data in 2001, the United States ranked 4th among the 30 nations surveyed. After several years of steady decline in the rankings, we now rank 15th (see Figure 1). While adoption rate is an important measure, it is not sufficient to accurately assess a nation's relative position in technology. A more complete measure would also consider speed and price. Increasingly, in the digital economy it is the speed and capacity of the network that matters. Therefore, ITIF has expanded upon the OECD rankings, developing a model that measures penetration, price and speed in OECD countries. The findings show that America, which ranks 12th overall, faces a multifaceted challenge. There are several steps that policymakers should take to ensure faster progress toward ubiquitous high-speed broadband, including: - Congress should exempt services from federal, state and local taxation and from requirements to pay into the Universal Service Fund. - All states should enact video franchise laws. - Congress should enact tax incentives for the deployment of new high-speed networks. - The FCC should move to a two-tiered definition of high-speed Internet by developing a more robust 3 megabit per second (mbps) asymmetrical broadband standard. - The FCC should collect county-level subscriber data for both speed tiers. - If Congress fails to mandate changes to FCC local data collection, states should work through non-governmental entities to collect and report local data. - The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) should help facilitate the development of a bottom-up database of local speeds and prices.

Rural Telemedicine: Lessons from Alaska for Developing Regions

Alaska shares many characteristics with other rural and remote regions of the Asia-Pacific, including a small population spread over a large area, lack of roads linking villages to hospitals, a significant indigenous population, and a shortage of doctors in rural areas. Communication with village health aides was originally by high frequency (HF) radio. Satellites brought reliable voice communication in the 1970s. Alaska has now introduced the first permanent upgrade to the voice satellite system, known as the Alaska Federal Health Care Access Network (AFHCAN). This satellite-based system is now the world's most extensive telemedicine network, linking 248 sites, including 158 village health centers. This paper examines the approach used to design the network, and includes preliminary findings on utilization of the network and associated cost-savings. It also discusses the U.S. Universal Service Fund subsidy for rural health care facilities. It concludes with lessons learned that could be applicable for other remote and isolated areas and developing regions.

Market performance of Chinese telecommunications: new regulatory policies

The structure, conduct, and performance of Chinese telecommunications are analyzed to determine reform's impact on policy objectives. Recent performance suggests that a more comprehensive reform is needed. However, China's fragmented policy environment makes large-scale reform difficult. Further deregulation of the telecommunication industry requires several related initiatives: reduction of entry barriers, creation of a universal service fund (to defuse stakeholder concerns regarding access), and formation of a cross-sector antitrust regulatory agency (with a special interest in promoting competition where feasible). While these policies could further complicate decision making in a fragmented institutional environment, each initiative is directed at neutralizing powerful stakeholders who can block or delay reform.

Your Money or Your Speech: The Children's Internet Protection Act and the Congressional Assault on the First Amendment in Public Libraries

This article examines the inherent conflict between two Congressional approaches to public access to the Internet - the provision of federal funding support to schools and public libraries to ensure broad access to online information regardless of financial means, and federal restrictions on children's use of school and public library computers to access content that the government feels could be harmful to them. It analyzes the efficacy and constitutionality of the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), Congress's attempt to use its powers of the purse to control objectionable online content in the very institutions it has used to promote equality of Internet access, particularly for children. The article looks first at Congress's early attempts to directly control categories of online speech through the passage of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) and the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), two statutes that proved to be so insensitive to classic First Amendment principles that they were essentially dead on arrival at the courthouse. The article then focuses on Congress's strategic shift away from direct proscriptions of online content and toward control of Internet speech indirectly through the use of its spending power. CIPA attempts to regulate online content by making the distribution of Universal Service Fund (E-Rate) and related federal school and library technology funds contingent upon the recipient institution's agreement to place filtering software on all Internet-accessible computers. The article examines the history of Congress's use of its spending power as a regulatory tool, and takes issue with Congress's description of CIPA's funding conditions as a routine use of that power immune from First Amendment constraints. Arguing that public libraries are limited public forums subsidized by the government for the express purpose of facilitating broad private expression, the article recommends judicial review of CIPA based on the same strict scrutiny principles used by the Supreme Court in Rosenberger and Velazquez to invalidate similar government funding decisions that forced viewpoint and content-based regulation of private speech. The article contends that Congress has not met its burden under strict scrutiny of showing that Internet filtering in public libraries is constitutionally necessary to achieve the government's interests in protecting children, and argues that software filters cannot possibly be applied without compromising a great deal of library patrons' constitutionally protected online speech. The article concludes that, stripped of the facade of an innocent use of Congress's spending power, the Children's Internet Protection Act is merely the Computer Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act in disguise - yet another clumsy congressional attempt to censor Internet content without sufficient concern for the damage it will do to the First Amendment rights of library patrons, many of whom use libraries as the only place where they can gain access to the incredible wealth of diverse information available on the Internet.

The Internet and 'Telecommunications Services,' Access Charges, Universal Service Mechanisms and Other Flotsam of the Regulatory System

As digitization and packet switching revolutionize communications networks, American communications law faces a dilemma: How can it reconcile an old law that contains distinct regulatory structures for telephony, broadcasting, cable television, and satellites, and that leaves Internet Protocol transmission largely unregulated, with a future in which voice, video, text and data will simply be different form of to be transmitted using IP or other packet-switched protocols? In particular, to what extent should (or can) regulators impose existing regulation, including the snarl of cross-subsidies that dominates the telephone system, on IP networks? At the heart of existing regulation is the distinction between telecommunications service, whose providers are subject to FCC common-carrier regulation and must pay a percentage of revenues to a federal universal service fund, and information services, whose providers are subject to no such obligations. The dividing line Congress and the FCC have drawn between these categories, though, is no longer workable. We must redraw that line in the modern communications context, so as to focus regulatory obligations on the underlying transport -- otherwise, the FCC will not be able to make coherent policy when it comes to IP telephony and other new services. The FCC must approach existing subsidies so as to make its overall regulation minimally distorting and technology-neutral.

Dialing for dollars: The universal service fund

Dialing for dollars: The universal service fund

The Irwin handbook of telecommunications

The Irwin handbook of telecommunications

Pricing voice telephony services: Who is subsidizing whom?

Abstract Local exchange companies (LECs) have argued that, because of entry, they will no longer be able to subsidize residential exchange service. The available economic data show that residential service is not subsidized. This finding casts doubt over the need for entrants to contribute to a universal service fund that would be used to subsidize residential service. Since 1984 there has been a radical decline in the cost of providing voice services. The failure of the LECs to adjust their rates to reflect the cost decline explains in part why competitive access providers have entered the market.

Cost considerations for rural telephone service

This study estimates the relationship between density and fixed costs for rural telephone companies, together with several other cost factors, to determine the costs of providing telephone service to different areas. It is found that not all rural companies are high-cost companies; rural cooperatives, for instance, have the lowest operating costs and lowest total expenses per access line. Yet low-interest loans, long-distance settlements and disbursements from the universal service fund are made available to these companies on the basis of only a portion of their costs.

Catalyst businesses

Utility subsidies are often defended as promoting universal service. However, specific support formulas may be poorly targeted and/or designed. The U.S. high-cost loop support (HCLS) program (formerly referred to as the Universal Service Fund (USF)), has been a key component of the FCC's USF program. With proposed initiatives for universal access to broadband, it is useful to critically evaluate how the HCLS creates a moral hazard problem. This study finds that companies receiving HCLS subsidies have an incentive to report high costs to the FCC in order to qualify for still higher support payments. Using data from 1136 rural telecom firms in 50 states (1992–2002), this study shows that some companies respond to current incentives by overstating costs (or incurring higher costs) as they approach the subsidy cutoff points. Compared to the no-subsidy group, companies at the point of greatest subsidy jump appear to overstate costs more due to larger marginal benefits. Such perverse incentives need to be recognized in future universal service initiatives.