Olympia Snowe: “This really is a crisis of epic proportion for this country. So what's at stake is the public interest now.”

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.

I just encourage all of us to think about children, about the problems they face, and about our responsibility to help them navigate their way through those waters.

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

We would not have connectivity and all that it brings to our schools and libraries if it were not for E-Rate.