Throttling access to online learning

Lennett, B. and Kehl, D. (2103) Capping the Nation’s Broadband Future Washington DC: New America Foundation

Lennett, B. and Kehl, D. (2013) Data Caps Could Dim Online Learning’s Bright Future Chronicle of Higher Education, March 4

Lennett and Kehl provide a good, clear summary of their report in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Basically they are concerned about the following:

• two companies (AT&T and Verizon) control two-thirds of the mobile market in the U.S.
• these two companies are charging extra for anything more than a gigabyte of data per month
•  if you tried to stream video lectures on that connection, you’d reach the data cap after about three hours and then face fees of $15 per gigabyte. If you tried to complete a course with 15 hours of video a month, your phone bill could arrive with as much as $70 in extra fees
• roughly 19 million Americans still don’t have access to Internet service capable of streaming a video lecture
• this will seriously inhibit online learning, especially for the poor and those in rural areas.

Their solution:

• get the FCC to increase competition between wireless carriers, especially in rural areas (a familiar recommendation for Canadians)
• get the government to invest more heavily in rural broadband connections through something like the New Deal Rural Electrification program.

Comment

Why stream video lectures? This is an absurdly expensive and inefficient way of doing online learning. Once again, we have people assuming that there was no online learning before video lecture capture.

Second, surely the issue is throttling, not online learning. Telecommunications companies should not be allowed to restrict selectively bandwidth use, or to try to cap Internet access, full stop.