A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and Ubiquitous High-Speed Broadband

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A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and Ubiquitous High-Speed Broadband

6/1/2005

By Terry Calhoun

What about the role of money? Well, the folks who want to make money should be able to adjust to making money with value-added functionalities and services. The point of this initiative seems to be that the Internet is as “public” a function as open town square space is. Analogously, what these higher education associations are calling for is that anyone be able to speak and to be heard. As the EDUCAUSE white paper that serves as background for this initiative puts it: “[T]he test should not be based on provider status within the public or private sector, but on whether a truly affordable, high-quality broadband access is being made available to all residents and businesses.”

Clearly, this is a reaction to the various lawsuits and state legislature movements to keep local and state governments from providing broadband to citizens and I heartily approve. The moves to keep broadband access from the public using lawsuits and legislatures is reminiscent both of the places in Latin America where companies have bought up entire villages’ water rights and try to get villagers whose families have used local wells for generations to pay to keep on using them. Or, of those many early science fiction stories about ‘airless’ space stations and planetoids where workers and “citizens” have to worry about running out of money, because that would mean they run out of air to breathe.

Lack of high-speed Internet access isn’t directly harmful to life . . . yet. But Access to information has always been important, essential to humans, and since most of the information we are going to want/need is coming through the Internet, it should in fact be the right of everyone to have such access. (Maybe we even need a Constitutional amendment?)

So, higher education–which has a huge stake in high-speed broadband–is stepping up and saying that it isn’t good enough when we reach out to households, only one-fourth of which have decent broadband. We need them all to have it in order to achieve educational aspirations.

If anything, the case could be made a great deal stronger. It probably g'es against the grain of many higher education leaders to think nationally in a competitive sense, but the United States leadership in higher education is currently threatened–not only by post-9/11 immigration regulations affecting graduate students, but by an explosion of new (and quality) higher education opportunities overseas.

So let me add one more argument to the Broadband for Higher Education position: In a changing economy which is bringing 5-6 times as many consumers and producers (of everything, not just education) into the global marketplace, we need the entire United States to be the future equivalent of Ann Arbor, Michigan or Austin, Texas, or Madison, Wisconsin. And making sure that our country of fully networked with the fastest possible broadband, accessible to all, is one way to position it well going into the future.

If you get a chance to speak with a local, regional, state, or federal politician–help make the point: Ubiquitous broadband is not about politics–it’s about a level playing field and a place to stand, air to breathe, and water to drink.

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

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Terry Calhoun, "A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and Ubiquitous High-Speed Broadband," Campus Technology, 6/1/2005, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=40299

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