by
dane » Fri Apr 16, 2021 6:40 pm
We’ve been approved for an Emergency Broadband Benefit Program service for students of the Berkeley Unified School District who qualify for the free/reduced lunch program. It will start at the EBB program start date, and until that time, Sonic is providing free service to these households. More details on the BUSD partnership can be found at:
https://www.prweb.com/releases/sonic_to ... 726457.htm
We will not initially have the capability to provide a generally available low-income program, primarily because of two factors: eligibility verification software and our voice bundle — voice service is not eligible for the EBB program. We are initiating a market test for a data only product, but the software isn’t yet complete for that yet. (And that development is primarily what is in front of the eligibility API work, if we take that up.)
(For the BUSD program, the district is doing the eligibility validation for us, and we’ll manually configure out the voice portion.)
Notable also: the EBB is only possible for data-only service that is on-net, so it couldn’t be used for a resold IPBB product, nor a Fusion product where the use of a UNE copper loop mandates the inclusion of a voice telecom service. Quite a few caveats.
We are seeking additional school districts to partner with in our fiber service cities in hopes that we can provide low income student households with fast reliable symmetrical gigabit fiber internet. Distance learning is hard enough, but great broadband can help.