Where WiscNet Stands on the FCC’s E-Rate Review
Oct. 1, 2026
The Federal Communications Commission is asking whether E-Rate — the program that helps schools and libraries afford the network connections they run on — should be narrowed, restricted to rural areas, reoriented, or ended. The questions are set out in FCC 26-41. Comments are due Oct. 13, 2026.
WiscNet's position is straightforward. E-Rate should be preserved.
E-Rate is not a device program or a general technology grant. It is a need-based discount on the recurring cost of connectivity and network services — the circuits, the capacity, and the equipment that everything else in a school or a library depends on. Recurring costs do not go away because a network is already built. They are the reason the network keeps working.
In Wisconsin, that support reaches further than a list of applicants suggests. Technology for Educational Achievement (TEACH), the state program administered by the Wisconsin Department of Administration, uses E-Rate support to subsidize much of the cost of an eligible site's Category 1 circuit. Wisconsin schools and libraries have built two decades of connectivity economics on that arrangement.
WiscNet has joined the Save Our E-Rate coalition organized by the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition, together with the American Library Association, the Consortium for School Networking, and the Association of Educational Service Agencies.
WiscNet has filed comments with the Commission in WC Docket Nos. 26-133, 13-184, 21-93, and 21-455.
We are asking the Commission to keep E-Rate's core statutory mission and its existing school, library, and consortium applicants; to maintain predictable, need-based discounts; to avoid defining educational and library purpose so narrowly that ordinary instruction, research, accessibility, public access, and community learning become harder to support; and to weigh any eligibility change against its documented effects on rural and high-need applicants, on cybersecurity and reliability, and on local budgets. A program limited to rural applicants would leave qualifying urban and suburban schools and libraries with the same recurring costs and no way to meet them.
Improving how the program is administered is a fair subject. Ending it is a different thing entirely.
Media contact: Sarah Miller at sarahmiller@wiscnet.net