On the information superhighway, Baltimore is being passed by other major U.S. cities, including Boston, Washington and New York.
Access to faster broadband Internet service is increasingly viewed as an economic imperative, and not just a privilege for those who can afford it. But many rural and some urban communities, such as Baltimore, are worried that they're being left behind as commerce, innovation and prosperity are increasingly intertwined with the Internet.
"My take on it is that Baltimore is not equipped for the future," said the Rev. Johnny Golden, past president of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and an advocate for improved access to technology in the city. "We have a decent broadband system for today, but it does not have the infrastructure to take us into the future where we need to go."
To address such concerns, the Federal Communications Commission recently released a 10-year-plan to bring greater broadband access to many Americans and rewire the country so it can better compete globally.
Meanwhile, hundreds of local jurisdictions nationwide are vying to lure the attention of Google, which plans to invest up to $1 billion to build a super-high-speed fiber-optic network to serve as many as 500,000 people. A grass-roots effort in Baltimore prompted Mayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake to organize a public-private endeavor to attract the Google pilot project to the city.
In comparison with other large U.S. cities, Baltimore trails in broadband adoption among its residents, according to FCC statistics. And there are wide disparities across Maryland, with the most affluent counties of Howard and Montgomery having the best Internet connections, while Baltimore and rural counties lag, according to the data from the end of 2008.
As few as 200 and as many as 400 out of every 1,000 Baltimore households were using a minimum level of broadband service at the end of 2008 - compared with a range of 600 to 800 out of every 1,000 households in New York and Boston. Telecommunications carriers are required to report their customers' broadband adoption in a range that makes it easy to make comparisons across jurisdictions in the United States.
In Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago and Baltimore County, the rate is 400 to 600 out of every 1,000 households.
"I frequently am sitting at my computer and I'm always waiting for it to keep up, for stuff to come in from the Web," said Tom Loveland, chief executive of technology company Mind Over Machines based in Owings Mills. "I often lose one or two ideas because I couldn't get it out fast enough. It dawned on me that just doubling or tripling our speed would make everybody's productivity so much better."
Supporters of Baltimore's Google effort point to the city's educational and medical institutions, its budding technology and start-up culture, and its proximity to major federal agencies as reasons for the Internet giant to invest in the city.
Loveland, whom Rawlings-Blake appointed as volunteer "Google czar," said Baltimore has the people and the institutions capable of exploring new ways of handling the flood of data the Google service would bring. Google wants to build a network that delivers speeds of up to 1,000 megabits-per-second downloads - whereas Baltimore residents now generally have access to 50 megabits per second or less.
"Just imagine if you could walk through and go inside torrents of data," said Loveland, referring to how data was depicted in the Tom Cruise movie "Minority Report."
"If you could walk through them in a Tom Cruise way, and be inside the data, just imagine the insights you could come up with to improve innovation in America."
Spurring that kind of leap forward in innovation has increasingly become a public sector goal. The FCC's push for broadband improvement was mandated by the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act enacted last year.
Public officials, businesses and technology advocates have argued that better broadband infrastructure across the U.S. would boost the economy and foster innovation. The FCC has highlighted the benefits that more powerful broadband networks could bring in the areas of health care, education, energy and environment, government performance, civic engagement and public safety.
Among 30 developed countries, the United States was a middle-of-the-pack performer in broadband connections and ranked last in terms of consumer affordability, according to a recent Harvard study.
"People are really starting to understand how important it is as an infrastructure," said John B. Horrigan, director of consumer research for the FCC's national broadband plan.
