Public Interest Considerations

Joint Statement of Commissioners Gloria Tristani and Michael Copps, Mobile Allocation Order, FCC 01-256

The education community makes excellent use of the band. The 1,275 current ITFS licensees serve millions of students on thousands of channels at more than 70,000 locations. The licensees form a broad spectrum of educators and educational entities, including state governments, state universities, public colleges, secondary schools, elementary schools, parochial and private schools, public television stations, and hospitals.

These educators use the ITFS spectrum for a variety of innovative and successful applications, including telecourses at all educational levels, traditional educational programming, professional and worker training, and back office administrative communications for schools.

ITFS has made important contributions to the nation’s educational system. Success stories regarding the delivery of point-to-multi-point educational video and audio programming, interactive telecourses, and other ITFS-related applications are legion.

In order to illustrate the public interest value of this service, it is important to highlight examples of the efforts of a few licensees in three broad areas where ITFS improves our country’s educational performance

Rural Access. The South Carolina Educational Television Commission includes 64 stations. It serves nearly 800 public schools and more than 400,000 students. Given that a majority of South Carolina’s students live in rural areas, ITFS allows the state to tailor its educational technology plan so rural students have access to 1,500 hours of new educational programming each year, as well as live, interactive remote instruction. These powerful services might otherwise be beyond the reach of rural schools.

Inner City Access. The Catholic Television Network uses its ITFS licenses to serve more than 600,000 students and 400,000 households. Recipients of these services include schools, colleges, parishes, community centers, hospitals, nursing homes, and residences across the country. From the Los Angeles Archdiocese to the New York Archdiocese, these ITFS licensees are providing critical educational services to a large number of low-income communities where services delivered via CTN’s ITFS facilities bring educational resources that are otherwise unavailable.

Worker Training. Stanford University operates five ITFS channels. Using these channels, the university offers 250 graduate-level courses each year to thousands of workers at hundreds of companies in Northern California. In an era when “knowledge-based workers” are the most valuable resource to our national economy, the ITFS is giving Stanford and educational institutions around the country the ability to improve worker skills and improve productivity through remote education. In the last several years we have made significant changes in the service rules governing 2.5 GHz band, including allowing digital operations and two-way services.