Education Service Center, Region 20, located in San Antonio, Texas, serves more than 465,000 students and 127 independent school districts, charters, and private schools across 20 counties in the San Antonio Region of Texas.
Region 20 ESC has an established history of providing technology services, including transport and Internet access to local school districts and charters utilizing the consortium model. Upon reviewing the 2016 E-rate funding data for the region, it was determined that the region, would pay nearly 90M over the next 2 decades for internet access that was universally determined to be inadequate. A large portion of those funds were provided by the Federal E-rate program, but nearly 23M of that would be paid by districts to service providers for bandwidth that did not meet their needs. In 2017, more than 70 districts and charter schools participated in an RFP process for the Region 20 ESC Fiber Consortium. The winning bid proposed the use of over 750 miles of existing “dark” fiber and the additional build of approximately 590 miles of new fiber. Of the final 62 participating LEA’s, approximately 60% are rural districts who were limited by existing infrastructure. The vast majority of new fiber was in these areas. Using Category 1 construction, and State Match dollars, 98% of the dollars used for construction were provided. The remaining 2% was divided amongst the districts in a monthly fiber fee which includes: ISP services with 10 Gbps available bandwidth, maintenance, support, DDoS protection options, and E-rate administrative filing. Read More…
*Numbers based on 2017-2018 E-rate funding