The cable television industry pledged Tuesday to link the nation's primary and secondary schools to the Internet for free as the country is wired for high-speed digital cable service.
Cable operators said they plan to wire more than 3,000 schools in at least 60 communities the first year, with other communities to follow."It makes good business sense, and good sense as corporate citizens," said Decker Anstrom, president of the National Cable Television Association. "The private sector bears a responsibility for making education successful in the information age."
The move won immediate praise from federal officials responsible for deregulating the U.S. telecommunications industry.
"A milestone," said Sen. Larry Pressler, R-S.D., who shepherded the telecom deregulation bill through Congress as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. "The cable industry is taking the first step in competing for the loyalty and attention of future generations."
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt, who has urged more child-friendly media at the same time he oversees the deregulatory rules, called the action "a present I always wanted under our public-policy Christmas tree ... What the industry is doing is being a catalyst for competition among various technologies to be a tool for education."
As part of the telecom bill that became law in February, President Clinton and Congress required that low-cost Internet on-ramps be provided to schools, libraries and rural hospitals on grounds that modest "universal access" is a small price to pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars telecom companies stand to reap from deregulation.
Clinton also set a goal of connecting every classroom in the United States to the Internet by the 21st Century.
Under the cable industry program, companies will install a cable modem into at least one site in a school. These cable modems, which are still in development, are devices that connect computers to the Internet and other computer networks via coaxial cable at speeds much faster than standard modems that use telephone lines.
Some cable companies want to offer high-speed data links to customers as part of their effort to get into other telecommunications fields. But technical and financial hurdles still must be overcome.
Cable giants Tele-Communications Inc., Time Warner Inc., and Continental Cablevision and Comcast Corp. are among those developing the technology and planning to provide cable modems to schools in their service areas.
Other telecom industries including telephone companies have also proposed Internet connections to schools. For instance, AT&T Corp. pledged last October to spend $150 million over five years to help connect schools to the network.
While cable association president Anstrom said his industry's goal is to link as many public and private classrooms as possible to the Internet nationwide, the scope and speed of the project depends on cable's overall plans to rewire the nation to the new technology. "A lot depends commercially on how successful service will be," he said.
Also praising the cable industry decision were teacher unions and the PTA. Its national president, Joan Dykstra, said linking classrooms to the Internet via cable "isn't the silver bullet for education, but it's clearly an absolutely perfect step in the right direction."