Olympia Snowe: “I want to applaud you for your longstanding leadership in spearheading this initiative for major reform.”

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.

I do want to acknowledge the bipartisan effort and support for the E-Rate Program by Chairman Rockefeller and Maine's original E-Rate champion, Olympia Snowe.

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.