Badgernet.org

Wisconsin is preparing to give up most of its 33 wireless channels to certain selected (read: politically connected) vendors. These ireplaceable FCC-licensed frequencies were originally designated for use by schools and colleges to facilitate distance education applications. Many educational professionals (including yours truely) believe such an unconditional “sale” is not wise, because the educational institutions would end up contracting with these same  vendors to “buy back” their own wireless capacity when their students and faculty need to extend the range of their “hot spots”.

Members of the State’s Central Procurement Authority believe the money is needed to help close the $2 billion gap that was partially created when past Badgernet, E-Mail, central server, and other initiatives went awry and had to be augmented or decommissioned. It certainly would be more cost-effective to trade SOME spectrum capacity in return for compatible infrastructure to carry educational applications.

The following map shows the approximate service area for ECB’s wireless licenses:

What do YOU think?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Technology Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.