E-Rate Funding & CIPA for Wi-Fi

It was almost twenty years ago when The Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA) came to fruition.  The necessity for CIPA became apparent during the 1990’s as the availability and integration of the Internet grew rapidly.  As Internet was not available to all citizens at that time due to location or cost, libraries served as a logical provider of Internet access to the community.  It did not take long however for the concept of unintended consequences to emerge.  While the Internet provided a near unlimited store of valuable information, it also contained an expansive aggregate of pornography as well.

The common term used in place of the Schools and Libraries Program. The E-rate Program provides discounts to schools and libraries for eligible products and services. E-rate is a federally funded stream designed to make telecommunications and information services more affordable for schools and libraries.  E-rate is funded by the Universal Service Fund, which dates back to 1934.

E-Rate can provide essential funding for services and infrastructure that would normally be unobtainable for some educational organizations.  

The Universal Service Schools and Libraries Program, commonly known as the E-rate Program, was created to provide discounts to eligible schools and libraries for telecom services, internet access and internal network infrastructure.  The program is funded through the Universal Service Fund and is administered by the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC).

The potential success that E-Rate can provide can require considerable time and effort of applicants.  For so many organizations though, the hard work is more than worth it in the end. We’ve broken down the  E-Rate process into six logical successive steps. 

If you are new to the whole E-Rate funding process you will find this toolbox very useful. It's a one stop shop for all the information and advice you need to submit an application for E-Rate Funding.

It includes a training video that shows you how to create a user account for the E-Rate Productivity Center (EPC) account and application management portal for the Schools and Libraries (E-rate) Program.  You will use this tool to manage your projects, receive notifications and contact customer service.  

To be eligible for E-rate funding, schools must demonstrate they have measures in place to prevent children from accessing mature or dangerous content and from having personal data stolen, in compliance with CIPA regulations. Solutions such as the WebTitan webfilter can bring your IT infrastructure up to CIPA requirements with powerful web filtering inluding real-time updates to help identify and block the latest threats.

This includes over 550 million end users and growing-and is the primary in-house source for threat corpora used to train
human-supervised Machine Learning systems. This combined and integrative approach empowers us to continuously enhance,
optimize, and fine-tune our malicious detection capabilities in an ever-changing threat landscape.

WebTitan On-The-Go (OTG) is a roaming agent used with TitanHQ's WebTitan Cloud platform. 

WebTitan OTG offers a fast and cost-effective way to apply policies to your devices from the cloud. It protects users by creating a safe learning environment suitable for children in the classroom or at home. WebTitan OTG is available for Chromebooks, Windows & Apple devices.

WebTitan Cloud enhances your school's CIPA compliance by creating a safe learning environment by blocking students from obscene and offensive web content on devices whether they are in the classroom or at home.

WebTitan is currently protecting 10 million students and 2.5 billion DNS requests a day with T-Mobile, not only blocking obscene and inappropriate websites but continuously scanning for security threats including malware, viruses and ransomware. 

Protect your students with WebTitan Cloud, supporting CIPA Compliance and creating a safe environment for children.  Start Free Trial.