Help Convince Google To Bring Blazingly Fast Internet To Baltimore — Call To Action
Image: bmorefiber.com
I know what you’re thinking — why would we want yet another option for broadband Internet in Baltimore? I mean, we can already get moderately fast service (16Mb/sec bursts if you pay for “PowerBoost”) service through Comcast, a company that has a reputation for being an absolute pleasure to deal with and has always worked quickly — like a well-oiled machine — to resolve issues affecting our neighborhood. Sure they impose (but don’t usually disclose) a 250GB per month bandwidth cap, but who would ever need to transfer that much data when all we do is read a few web pages every now an then. In fact, Comcast really puts things in perspective for us:
250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 – 3 GB. To put 250 GB of monthly usage in perspective, a customer would have to do any one of the following:
- Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
- Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
- Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
- Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)
Wow. 50,000,000 emails in a month. That sure sounds like a lot, and we wouldn’t possibly want to watch our movies in high-definition (8 GB/movie) or watch HD TV over our Internet connection (13 GB/baseball game) instead of flipping through the selection of content that Comcast chooses to offer us over the same wire in the form of cable TV. And no one in our house ever watches different content at the same time, doubling or tripling our consumption.
OK. I know that some of you don’t feel Comcastic about our favorite cable monopoly. Don’t worry — there’s another option. A little company called Verizon also offers “broadband” service in the form of DSL. They have no (published) bandwidth cap, and they are offering speeds of up to 1.5Mb/sec — only 10x slower than Comcast. Some of us may also qualify for speeds of up to 3Mb/sec, depending on how many feet our house is from an arbitrarily located “central office”. And a very lucky few of us may be told that we can technically get 6Mb/sec but that the technician can’t enable it because the billing office says not to in our area. Oh, and Verizon does have a high-speed broadband option called FiOS, but we’ll probably never see it in Baltimore City because of the cost of running new lines in an urban environment.
See? Plenty of choices. Just as long as we do what we are told and don’t use too much data, we should be perfectly happy with what we have — right? Never mind that there is an ever-increasing amount of high-definition content on the Internet that would put us well over our bandwidth cap if we watched it instead of cable TV. Disregard the fact that our current service options were designed for yesterday’s Internet and not for tomorrow’s. Ignore the feeling that Comcast wants to keep you from using your Internet connection for video content so that they can up-sell you on profitable premium channels.
Oh, by the way, Google is planning to test ultra-high-speed broadband in a select number of cities, and they are choosing the cities based on feedback and nominations from the public. You wouldn’t be interested in that, would you? Did I mention that it would be priced competitively with existing services but would deliver speeds of 1Gb/sec (2,000% faster than the fastest residential Comcast option)? According to Google:
Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better, and faster for everyone. Here are some specific things that we have in mind:
- Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive “killer apps” and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine.
- New deployment techniques: We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks; to help inform, and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.
- Openness and choice: We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory, and transparent way.
If you are interested in learning more about this new initiative, some of Baltimore’s techies have put together a site, BmoreFiber, dedicated to promoting Baltimore to Google. The site implores you, in its largest available font, to, “Ask Google to Invest Billions in Baltimore’s Future.”
The nominations end March 26th, so please don’t delay. Head over to BmoreFiber to give them your email address and ZIP code before clicking through to Google’s site to complete the nomination form.
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I’m moving to Mt. Washington this summer and research tells me Sprint offers 4G air card service in Mt. Washington. Has anyone had experience with Sprint in the area and, specifically, their air card?
We tried Xohm at our house for a while, which I believe uses Sprint’s 4G network. The coverage map showed that most of Mt. Washington is covered but that our house was just outside of the coverage area.
We decided to try anyway and had very little success.
The 4G modem connected to the service but only had 1 bar. That meant that when that one bar turned into zero bars, the connection would drop.
In all fairness, we weren’t in the coverage zone, but we were within a block of it. That was a bout a year ago though, and they may have expanded the area.