FCC Diversity Committee Approves Survey Plan, AT&T and Comcast Step Up 2012 Community Programs
An FCC panel approved plans to create an equal employment opportunity compliance survey. Approval came at the Diversity Federal Advisory Committee’s meeting Wednesday. The commission would need to give $50,000 to $75,000 to the EEO subcommittee, if those funds become available, to do the survey to get information about companies’ attitudes towards compliance responsibilities and best practices, said subcommittee Chairman David Honig. The FCC will continue to work with the subcommittee towards starting that project, said Chief of Office of Communications Business Opportunities Thomas Reed. The Diversity Committee also heard reports from the Wi-Fi Technology and Channels 5 & 6 subcommittees and presentations about updates to the AT&T Aspire program to mentor kids and Comcast’s Internet Essentials broadband service for the poor.
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The Wi-Fi Technology subcommittee will explore ways to educate women, minority and small business entrepreneurs about the benefits of unlicensed spectrum technology and about creating FCC-compliant devices, said subcommittee Chairman Nicol Turner-Lee. When the subcommittee surveyed small sections of those communities, the majority of subjects was not aware of “application, appropriate use and opportunities to leverage the unlicensed device marketplace and to create services and pilot programs to advance public good,” she said. The majority said they had never heard of unlicensed spectrum technologies but would like to learn about them, Turner-Lee said. Reed said the internal diversity task force will work with the subcommittee to find ways to educate the community about these opportunities.
The FCC needs to converse with the Channels 5 & 6 Subcommittee about the feasibility of moving AM stations to the lower FM band, said Reed, who spoke in the absence of the subcommittee chairman. Issues with that idea include costs for AM station owners, multicast costs, transmission and conversion costs, and the fact that many interested individuals don’t have the resources to shoulder start-up costs, he said.
The AT&T Aspire Program aims for social innovation, deploying more of the company’s employees and labs, engaging customers and focusing on at-risk students and underserved populations over the next four years, said AT&T Executive Government Affairs Director Scott Sapperstein. The program uses things like job shadows to create college and career readiness among students and has reached more than 100,000 students so far, he said: “We want to aspire to an America where every student graduates high school equipped with the knowledge and skills to power the nation’s work force.”
AT&T will spur this innovation by “investing locally, connecting people and seeking exponential change,” Sapperstein said. AT&T will encourage participation of local programs as well as national programs, he said. Aspire will take the job-shadow program to “the next level” by placing a student with an employee and giving them an opportunity to solve a work or life problem together. There will also be online components to the program, called e-mentoring, which will work with national partners, he said. The program will also look into partners which educate students through games and online programs, he said.
Comcast’s Internet Essentials program will now include families whose children get reduced-cost school lunches, rather than only free-lunch families, said Vice President Bret Perkins. Other enhancements this year will include doubling broadband connection speeds, allowing organizations to buy Internet Essentials connections in bulk to reach more families, expanding digital literacy training efforts and working with the FCC-private sector Connect2Compete program to reduce hardware costs for participating families. Internet Essentials offers broadband for $9.95 monthly and computers for $149.99 to families whose children qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches.
Comcast has created an online portal to allow educators and third parties to print out or order, free of charge, educational materials to spread the word about Internet Essentials, Perkins said. More than 12 million pieces of material have been ordered and shipped so far, he said. Comcast has briefed more than 3,000 government and community leaders, sent kits out to 4,000 school superintendents and sent 30,000 packets to communities to help propagate the program.