Arkansas Opening Bids For State School Broadband

Arkansas has opened a bid invitation to create a new broadband network for schools, with work scheduled to begin in July.

An invitation for bid covering seven years was opened March 9 asking providers for pricing for broadband services, according to a letter sent to school superintendents by Mark Myers, director of the Department of Information Systems and the state’s chief technology officer.

The letter said the state will be financially responsible for providing Internet access to district hubs, while school districts would be responsible for metropolitan access network services connecting individual buildings from those hubs.

ADE initially will provide sufficient funding for districts to have a minimum of 100 megabits per second at the district hub, with the goal being to reach a standard of 100 kilobits per second per student, a standard set by the Federal Communications Commission. Currently, 58% of Arkansas districts meet that standard.

Janet Wilson, spokesperson for DIS, said she could not comment because it’s still an active bid.

The network conversion would begin in July.

According to the letter, “This undertaking should result in the vast majority of the state’s K-12 schools having sufficient internet access by the completion of the 2015-16 school year. By June 30, 2017, the overall implementation should be completed to 100 percent of the state’s public schools.”

The invitation for bid allows for vendor costs to increase over seven years so that bandwidth would increase to 1 megabit per second per student. The contract would allow the vendor to sell school districts the metropolitan access network services.

The letter said that DIS soon will contact school districts and their technology coordinators about their existing contracts’ expiration dates.