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CenterFuse Broadband Feasibility Report ISPs in the US charge prices t many customers that are higher than advertised prices. The real price of broadband in the US is higher than is shown in this analysis. ISPs Brid2ine the Price Gap Charter Charter has a low-income program called Internet Assist. Charter charges $17.99 for a connection at 30 Mbps. There are no data caps. To be eligible a home must qualify for the National School Lunch Program, a state lunch program, or Supplemental Security Income for seniors. Consolidated Consolidated participates in the FCC's Federal Lifeline program. This program provides a discount of $9.25 that a low-income home can apply to broadband or telephone service (but not both—one discount per household). Customers get the lower price and Consolidated collects the $9.25 from the FCC's Universal Service Fund. The Homework Gap In 2010 the FCC adopted the National Broadband plan, and one of the key provisions of that plan is that every American community should have gigabit broadband connections to public schools. Since that time, the State Educational Technology Directors Association has increased that recommendation and recommend that large schools provide at least 1.4 Mbps of broadband per student for large schools and 2.8 Mbps per student in smaller schools in order to provide adequate bandwidth. The group Education Superhighways s reported in 2020 that only 7 of 1,7030 public schools in Washington still didn't have a fiber broadband connection. The schools in Ellensburg are connected to gigabit fiber. The more recent issue concerning education is being labeled nationally as the homework gap. This is the situation where students have broadband at school but don't have adequate broadband and/or computers at home to enable them to do homework. The issue recently became a lot more serious when students were sent home due to COVID-19 and asked to finish the school year remotely. In Ellensburg, 36%of homes in the survey that had school age students reported that the home broadband was not adequate to do remote schoolwork. How much bandwidth is needed to do schoolwork at home?It varies according the specific set-up at a given school. The typical way for a student to connect to a school system network is through the creation of a virtual private network(VPN) connection. A VPN works by grabbing and reserving a dedicated data path between the home and a server, in this case a school server. While that student is connected to the school,that data path is dedicated to the student and can't be used for other purposes in the home without kicking the student off the VPN connection. 11 https://www.educatiansuperhighway.org/ Page 45