Olympia Snowe: “I think it's essential. It's obviously languished for more than a half a century, and it has been on the National…”

What is needed is honest, fact-based discussion and a genuine bipartisan commitment to solutions.

Due in no small part to the leadership of Senators Rockefeller and Snowe, the E-Rate program from its inception focused on providing high-capacity transmission services to libraries and schools.

In closing, libraries are vital community technology hubs, and we simply cannot allow inadequate bandwidth to be the limiting factor for what our students and our nations can achieve.

By the end of this decade, I believe that every school in America should have 1 gigabit of connectivity.