As part of the effort to free up mid-band spectrum, the FCC is taking a fresh look at the 2.5 GHz spectrum band. This band of spectrum is divided into 33 channels; the lower 16 channels are designated as EBS (Educational Broadband Service) with the remainder as BRS (Broadcast Radio Service).

The EBS band was first granted to educational institutions in 1963 under the designation ITFS (Instructional Television Fixed Service) and was used to transmit educational videos within school systems. It became clear that many schools were not using the spectrum and the FCC gave schools the authority to lease excess capacity on the spectrum for commercial use. In urban markets the spectrum was leased to networks like HBO, Showtime and the Movie Channel which used the spectrum to delivery content after the end of the school day. In the late 1990s the spectrum was combined with MMDS in an attempt to create a wireless cable TV product, but this use of the spectrum never gained commercial traction.

In 1998 the FCC allowed cellular companies to use the leased spectrum for the new 3G cellular. In 1998 the FCC also stopped issuing new licenses for the spectrum band. Companies like Craig McCaw’s Clearwire leased the spectrum to deliver competitive cellular service in many urban areas. In 2005 the FCC cemented this use to allow the spectrum to be used for two-way mobile and fixed data.

Today the technology has improved to the point where the spectrum could help to solve the homework gap in much of rural America. The spectrum can be used in small rural towns to create hot spots that are tied directly to school servers. The spectrum can also be beamed for about 6 miles from tall towers to reach remote students. The spectrum has nearly the same operating characteristics as the nearby 2.4 GHz WiFi band, meaning that long-distance connections require line-of-sight, so the spectrum is more useful is areas with wide-open vistas than in places like Appalachia.

A group of educational organizations including the Catholic Technology Network, the National EBS Association, the Wireless Communications Association International and the Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network petitioned the FCC to expand the EBS network and to grant new EBS licenses to fully cover the country. The FCC has been considering a plan that would strengthen the educational use of the spectrum and which would also auction the rest of the spectrum for use as wireless broadband.

The use of the spectrum for rural educational uses could be transformational. Rural students could get a small dish at their homes, like is done with the fixed wireless deployed by WISPs. Students would them have a direct connection to the school systems servers for doing homework. Interestingly, this would not provide a home with regular Internet access, other than what might be granted by schools for links needed for doing homework.

The disposition of the spectrum band is complicated by the fact that Sprint holds much of the spectrum under long-term lease. Sprint holds licenses to use more than 150 MHz of the spectrum in the top 100 markets in the country, which currently provides them with enough spectrum to simultaneously support both 4G LTE and 5G. The speculation is that the FCC is working on a plan to free up some of this spectrum as a condition to the merger of Sprint and T-Mobile.

This is the only current spectrum band where the FCC is envisioning different urban and rural uses, with rural parts of the country able to use the spectrum to connect to students while in urban areas the spectrum is used to support 5G. This divided use was only made possible by the historic educational component of the spectrum. If the FCC tries to give all of this spectrum to the cellular carriers they’d have to reclaim the 2,200 licenses already given to school systems – something they are politically unwilling to tackle.

However, this solution points to a wider solution for rural residential broadband. The FCC could order the same type of rural/urban bifurcation for many other bands of spectrum that are used primarily in urban settings. We need to find creative ways to use idle spectrum, and this spectrum bank provides a roadmap that ought to be applied to other swaths of spectrum.

Freeing the spectrum for full use by rural education offers big potential, but also creates challenges for rural school systems which will have to find the money to build and deploy wireless networks for homework. But solving the rural homework gap is compelling and I’m sure many school districts will tackle the issue with gusto.