WCA: Education takes the floor

Education was the topic of the morning at the general session for day 2 of the Wireless Communications Association's annual conference. Throughout the history of education, it has been the norm to make the customer go to the educational source, said Patrick Gossman, director university television at Wayne State University (Detroit, MI). He is also executive director of the Community Telecommunications Network and president of the ITFS Association, which is an organization whose members use FCC-granted wireless licenses to provide instructional services through schools, colleges, and other community groups nationwide. Gossman said the future will bring the university to the customer. One key to making this possible is that the driver for higher education has shifted from religion, to government, and now to business.

Big Business
"Corporate training is becoming big business," Gossman said. And higher education is bringing in revenue in the trillions of dollars worldwide. In the United States, he added, higher education brings in $2.5 billion dollars in revenue per year. Technology is moving so fast that the days of receiving your degree and being finished with education are over. Gossman said that the half-life of a degree is shrinking at an incredible speed. Half of what you learn is obsolete in three years, and computer science is half that at 18 months. He predicted that in a few years, employees in the technology arena will spend an average of one day a week in the classroom just to keep up to date so they can do their jobs. It's imperative that the classrooms come to the student, he said.

Technology
The other key to bringing education to the customer is the technological know-how—building communications networks that can reach everywhere. The problem is that we're not quite at that stage yet. Current communications networks don't support anytime, anywhere learning, and they are bandwidth challenged, Gossman said. However, he emphasized that wireless is key to reaching this goal. The spectrum is there, he said. It's up to the broadband wireless access industry to help take that next step.

WorldCom president and CEO Bernard Ebbers also spoke on the importance of education, as well as the blurring of lines between telecommunications segments.

"The all-distance model is upon us," Ebbers said. "What matters is how much bang customers will get for their buck." As the local-long distance lines are blurring, the same paradigm shift is occurring between wireless and wireline. The more pervasive wireless becomes, the more, pervasive the wired world becomes as well, he said. They feed off each other.

Smart Business
He said that MMDS spectrum is like a coin with two sides. On one side is high-speed competition to DSL and cable modem technologies and serving as the broadband pipe for rural areas. The flip side involves education and Instructional Television Fixed Service (ITFS) partners. MMDS opens up a new world. "When teamed with ITFS, we can harness potential spectrum and contribute to education like never before," Ebbers said. "Extending opportunities to American students is good business."

Ebbers underscored WorldCom's pledge to offering "all-distance" technology and educational applications to 1,000 Mississippi schools by next year. He said the company will contribute $2 million to a program to offer wireless Internet service and connectivity to schools in four rural southern states, Including Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and North Carolina. It will also provide training support to teachers—through the company's Marco Polo program, a no-cost, standards-based content for K-12 teachers and classrooms—so they will feel comfortable using the equipment in the classroom.

Ebbers also got in a few jabs at the U.S. Department of Justice, expressing concern that the U.S. government is driving the industry toward "the re-monopolization of local service to consumers."

By Ellen Jensen