Many phone calls went back and forth on Thursday. The extended E-rate 471 filing deadline had finally arrived. Frantic last minute filings took place. Patience was pushed to its limit more than once. Tempers boiled and were restrained.

And then it was over.

Dan Patterson had the foresight to see that this last few weeks was going to be stressful. He arranged for a celebration. So a few of us met in Richfield on Friday for that purpose.

It was a small gatherning representing a few of us that spent many thousands of hours in the past few months trying to maximize the e-rate benefit for Utah Public Education. Representatives from UEN, Qwest, Gunnison Telephone, Manti Telephone, Central Utah Telephone, Uinta Basin Telecommunication Association, SESC, SEDC and CUES were present.

It was nice to take a few minutes and consider what has been done. Contracts for Ethernet services have been signed between UEN, School Districts and the Telcos that serve in these areas. Both Urban and Rural locations will benefit. Gigabit Ethernet circuits have been offered for anywhere from $635/month to $1300/month, depending on locations, presence of fiber, vendor, engineering design, etc.

Of course, there will be much more work. The SLD will ask many questions and there will be lots of information that will flow between UEN and the feds. Districts, UEN and the Telcos will spend many more hours planning and implementing. And, oh,yeah, we need more money to make all of this work.

The potential total increase in federal e-rate dollars for UEN services is a bit over $7 million annually. Add Elementary Schools and this increases by $2 million or so. That's great. The concern is that to get these dollars we will need to come up with about $3.5 million from somewhere. That's tough to do in our present economic environment.

Part of the budget could come from streamlining things at UEN. We will certainly try to reallocate dollars for this project. Last year we lost $1.5 million dollars. In that same year we wrenched $1 million dollars out of our operating budgets to cover replacement of equipment and to address other pressing projects. So there may not be a whole lot more of that sort of cutting left. The operating budget is pretty tight already.

Some of the dollars will come from the offset of what we are paying for circuits now. That won't be a great deal of money. Even if a current T-1 circuit is $500 per month our net cost will be more along the lines of $150 (after e-rate). Increase the Ethernet circuit to $1000 per month and add $150 per month or an additional $1800 per year net. Multiply that over hundreds of circuits and the cost is substantial.

We don't now know how the economics will work out. Mike Petersen spent time at this celebration to tell us that there is a potential of another half million dollar reduction to the UEN base allocation. That would hurt.

That is also a dose of reality. And on this day we didn't want to think much about it. We chose instead to focus on the fact that we did everything necessary to bring as much as an extra $9 million dollars of federal money into the State. And we focused on the fact that this money would go to the LECs in the state to help them generate business, build infrastructure, pay bills, wages, etc. It would be an extremely good thing for an industry under economic fire.

And we realized that mostly, it would help the children of Utah to get a better educational experience.

Monday we will get back to reality. It is good to pause every now and then to think about the good work that has been done.

And the reasons for doing it.

That's all for now...........
10:29:09 PM    comment []