Posted by: AT&T Blog Team on February 2, 2012 at 3:52 pm
By Xavier Williams, AT&T Senior Vice President of Public Sector and Healthcare:
Yesterday, I participated in a great town hall event here in Washington to kick off the first ever National Digital Learning Day, of which AT&T is a proud sponsor. For several months now, AT&T has been working closely with the Digital Textbook Collaborative, composed of other members of the industry, to determine ways to bring digital textbooks into our country’s K-12 school system.
After combining years of expertise in education technology, it was a pleasure this afternoon to present the results of our efforts to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Through what has been dubbed the Digital Textbook Playbook, we are providing school district leaders with guidance on how best to bring effective digital learning opportunities to fruition in their respective classrooms. It is a planning resource for schools to transition into digital learning by classifying broadband infrastructure, distinguishing home and community broadband to extend access, and indentifying necessary device considerations.
The Playbook is a unique and exciting development that can help the United States achieve the goals laid out in the FCC’s National Broadband Plan along with the Education Department’s National Education Technology Plan.
This has been an extraordinary collaboration in education technology among the public and private sectors, and it has been a privilege for AT&T to play a part in this effort. We look forward to continuing our work in this area.
Read More 
Posted by: Bob Quinn on January 26, 2012 at 3:08 pm
“Broadband is the great infrastructure challenge of the early 21st century.”
That is the opening sentence of the National Broadband Plan, and the challenge that the Plan spends almost 400 pages trying to address. And that’s the point Sprint has ignored entirely in responding to my recent blog.
Fact: There are vast territories in rural Kansas and Oklahoma where Sprint used to offer their customers a 3G on-net broadband wireless experience where they will now rely on roaming (or, the practice of piggy-backing on competitors’ networks). Sprint may now claim that it had some type of “infrastructure” deal which it characterizes as “roaming” but that is not what Sprint proclaimed in its maps in identifying the “Sprint footprint” and it is certainly not what Sprint told its customers in the affected areas when it started selling them iPhones last year.
Read More
Posted by: Bob Quinn on August 2, 2011 at 11:44 am
So, the FCC/Sam Knows “Measuring Broadband America” speed test is finally finished and guess what? The Sam Knows results, which measured the actual speeds provided by ISPs to their subscribers, demonstrates that American consumers are getting the broadband speeds they’re paying for. For example, most major broadband providers deliver actual speeds that are “generally 80% to 90% of advertised maximum speeds or better.” And even during peak usage periods (7pm to 11pm on weeknights), ISPs were still able to deliver actual speed that are “80% of advertised maximum speeds or better.” These results, based on data from monitoring equipment installed in consumer homes and in ISP networks, debunk the conventional mythology that ISPs are delivering far less than the speeds they advertise. Unfortunately, that mythology grew out of an unscientific and unreliable report that was picked up and repeated by some credible sources in the past, even making its way into the National Broadband Plan. Of course, real facts will not be enough to satisfy everyone. Some of the so-called public interest groups actually began bashing the report a couple of weeks ago (apparently you don’t have to actually see a report before you begin attacking its findings). Like other conspiracy theorists, those consumer groups are wedded to the mythology and won’t let things like pesky facts get in their way.
But you have to hand it to the FCC. True to the Chairman’s word, he was not satisfied with guesswork and instead insisted on conducting a fact-based inquiry into what was really happening in the marketplace. The results are in, and it’s clear that consumers are getting high-quality broadband services from their ISPs. Perhaps now we can get past the rhetoric about advertised vs. actual speeds and focus on the important task of ensuring all Americans have access to these broadband services. Reforming the universal service program to provide support for broadband, making more spectrum available for mobile broadband services, and, of course, approving the AT&T / T-Mobile merger, which will enable the combined company to deploy LTE to 97% of the U.S. population, would all be big steps the FCC could take toward the goal of making broadband ubiquitous in America. SamKnows has shown us what broadband can do where it’s available; the challenge now is to make sure everyone has an opportunity to use it.
Read More
