One Maryland Fiber-Optic Broadband Project

Craig Settles sits down, across the country, to interview Maryland's Lori Sherwood, the Program Director for One Maryland. One Maryland is a stimulus-funded project bringing fiber-optic broadband to every county in the state. We have written about several counties using these connections to start building muni fiber networks (see our stories tagged with Maryland). One of the partners is the Maryland Broadband Cooperative, which focuses on middle mile connections also. Listen to the interview: This project is expected to start saving the state some $30 million a year while greeting increasing the capacity to essential community institutions. Many of these institutions will undoubtedly be moving away from incumbent T1 and similar connections that have been gouging the taxpayers for years by grossly overcharging for what they provide. However, we do have the same concerns about this project as we recently noted in North Carolina's MCNC project, namely that statewide networks connecting libraries and schools take potential anchor tenants off networks that could be built by communities to serve everyone. Without these anchor tenants, it will be more difficult to finance a network available universally.