Looking for a low-cost, cutting-edge alternative to your Internet Service Provider? In some states, it might be worth your while to call your local school board.
A law signed last week in Michigan by Governor John Engler (R) requires that phone companies in the state - including giants like Ameritech and GTE - provide a wide array of telecom services at cost to school districts.
What the measure does, analysts say, is put schools in Michigan into the ISP business, with virtually free access to ISDN, ADSL, T1, and other bandwidth services, which they can resell to their own constituents. Nearby states, such as Pennsylvania and Indiana, and a host of others, are implementing similar provisions. The state of Wyoming adopted a related measure recently as well, and some local libraries and school boards there are starting to offer online access.
Observers, like Bruce Egan, executive vice president of Indetec International, a telecommunications consultancy, indicate that the laws are so vaguely written that the schools can actually offer online access to anyone they choose - they don't have to be students of the institution or parents of a student. "What is being created is a low-cost, Internet access avenue, funded by the states," says Egan.
Telecommunications companies supported the final wording of Michigan's Senate Bill 788. Ameritech spokeswoman Sara Snyder, based in Detroit, says that the company, and others, like MCI, Sprint, and AT&T, feared that the original language of the bill would require them to provide "at cost" access to telecommunications services to anyone who asked for it. So the school Internet provision was a compromise of sorts, with the phone companies, the largest ISPs in some local areas, cutting their losses.
The bill moved pretty quickly through the legislature in Michigan, as the result of several related forces.
Introduced in the spring by State Senator Mat Dunaskiss (R), the bill received a boost this past fall when US Senator Carl Levin (D) toured the rural reaches of the state and complained that studies show Michigan "below the national average" in the ratio of students per computer and in the number of students with Internet access and teachers with training on computers. Levin vowed to hold a technology summit in 1998 to address the issue.
The techno-tour was covered heavily by the papers there, creating political pressure for some kind of action. "We wanted to make sure that Michigan was wired," said John Truscott, an aide to Governor Engler.
Another factor in the passage of the bill was Ameritech's failure to get its long-distance plan approved. "The company will agree to anything in order to get the government to assent to its other plans," said Egan.
The law is now in force in Michigan, and is on the books until the turn of the century. Will local school boards provide effective competition for Ameritech? Snyder said the company does not fear any significant loss of ISP business. But Egan indicated that a small number of customers in Wyoming are starting to use the local school and library connections, avoiding regular ISPs. "They have their kids sign up for the service, and then do their work from home online," said Egan, a former advisor to the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment who resides in Wyoming.
Some technologists think that the idea is a pretty nifty one that won't be abused by parents of students. Sony Corp. is working with schools in Indiana to utilize fiber optics technology that provide schools with enhanced educational opportunities by allowing access to a broad range of curricula and classes through two-way interactive classrooms, said Sean Flynn, a spokesman for Sony.
But policy conservatives aren't so sure. "Schools should be in the business of educating, not in the ISP business," says Joe Lehman, spokesman for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a think tank in Midland, Michigan "Why not call this what it really is - a tax increase - rather than increasing costs by having other customers pay higher rates for their phone services."
