As the technology director for a small public school district, it's safe to say that I wear a lot of hats. While larger districts have separate positions for servers, desktop support, networking, and database management, I get the distinct pleasure of taking care of a lot of that stuff myself. Thankfully I have 
Over the last couple of years I have been working on upgrading our fiber connections so that we can have a 10 gigabit backbone on our network. For all intents and purposes, we don't really need a 10Gb backbone. Most of the services we use in house are pretty low overhead and the online services we use probably don't even come close to filling the 1 Gb connection we get to our Internet Service Provider.
I'm getting close to retirement though and I would like to think that I left our district in a good place as far as future proofing. I have already been in talks with our ISP and they plan on upgrading their hardware this summer so that we can have a 10Gb connection to them.
Meanwhile, the final leg of our network that connects our main campus to one of our elementary schools is connected with a 1Gb point to point wireless solution. Those radios have been working great for years, but they are over ten years old and I know eventually they will start having issues. On top of that, the company that supports the radios is all the way down in Indiana, so when we do have issues, it's at least four to five hours before they can even be on site to diagnosis it. At just about nine miles away, this elementary school isn't too far, but also just far enough that running fiber is a significant undertaking.
The good news is, the Federal Communications Commission has a grant program to help schools and libraries pay for services like this. I went out to bid for "transport service" which is basically dark fiber strands that a company leases out to us. Actually, we got two bids for the service. They both had pretty similar pricing in terms of the monthly service, but the "build out" to bring the fiber into our building was about $5000 from one company and closer to $20,000 from the other company.
The high cost of the build out got me wondering what it might cost to just run our own fiber. That way we can skip the monthly fee since we own the fiber. I knew the build out cost was going to be more significant, but I wasn't prepared for it to be the $800,000 that the sole bidder quoted us.
For a number of reasons (I won't go into here), I decided that although we will have a monthly fee, transport service is probably the smarter way to go. It's still a lower monthly fee than we currently pay for our point to point solution and it will be full 10Gb.
Hence part of the reason for the title of this post. Connectivity is not cheap. I'm sure it doesn't seem like it personally either when you pay that monthly bill to the cable company or whoever you get your Internet service from.
Speaking of home Internet. There is a lot of uncertainty right now for another government program that provides discounted Internet service to people who are consider low income. It's a program that has been around for a while and I am not sure if this is still the case, but when it was implemented it was based on free or reduced lunch status for families.
I've been hearing news reports lately about how this program could be cut if the government doesn't pass some bill or extend some funding as early as next week.
It's pretty sad to think that in a day and age when so many services, programs, and necessities are dependent on the Internet, that it is still woefully unaffordable for the majority of people. It's time some changes were made at the top level. Changes that people have been fighting for over the past couple of decades.
We all need affordable Internet. If the school districts can't afford it then how can we ever expect the average consumer to.
Sports Talk Social - @bozz.sports
All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or 