Could E-rate be going away for education? Economy and miss-spending could do it.
Remember many years ago when e-rate was suspended and they were going to overhaul the program? Now we wish they would have, we have too many vendors taking advantage of the program. Let me explain what I mean, I went to a school system a few hours away from Ohio. I went to an elementary school that had had only 17 users in the school. They had a huge switch (let say it was equal to a 6500 series Cisco), they had a full VOIP implementation with every possible option you could get. They had a video conferencing room, yes in an elementary school had this kind of system.
Now at any one time they have maybe 7 users on the system and have only used the video conferencing system twice in a year. I got called since the school system has this same set up in every school; they are getting killed with bandwidth now that they have really grown at other schools and are looking to see what they can do to reduce it. I asked the CIO why do you have this much equipment in your school system and at each school. He said they were sold by the vendor since they could get all of it on e-rate and pay a fraction of the total cost. I told him he had no choice if he wanted to keep his network running this way and to do more video/collaboration was to up his bandwidth.
He was really not happy with the vendor as they really did not explain the maintenance cost he would spend down the road, the bandwidth cost that would he would need if they did and expansion. So my question is, do vendor take advantage of the system and sell school massive pieces of gear since they know they can get away with it? When you have the government picking up a big piece of the cost why not right?
Well I think with the economy the way it is now, things will be changing. Our new administration coming in needs to halt all e-rate money, they need over haul the system. They need to make school systems more accountable for the money they get from e-rate and just not give them a blank check of which is what they have now. I know people will say you have to apply for it and have a plan to get the money. But they don’t know you are putting a 60k switch in an elementary school, they don’t look that you are running 4 fiber runs to that school of 17 users.
I am all for helping the schools, but this is another expense our tax dollars pay for and big business makes millions. The e-rate people need to have a CIO or Chief Architect that looks at everything before giving money. They need to have standards for the number of users at a school and what you can get, not a blank check for enterprise class switches and routers.
I think that this will be in the forefront for the millions misspent and starting in January it will be halted until the economy gets better and they can overhaul the system. So this is a wakeup call to all of those schools who are running their network on e-rate subsidies and who have to shut down without government money, you over spent. It is time to learn about what an ROI is and if you don’t have an ROI for anything you are going to buy, don’t buy it.
