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Choptank Electric Cooperative Accelerates Fiber Broadband Expansion in Rural Maryland
Choptank Electric Cooperative says the Denton, Maryland-based co-op is making significant progress on efforts to deliver fiber access to largely underserved residents of the Old Line State.
In 2021, Choptank decided to begin extending residential fiber broadband service to the cooperative’s 56,000 residential, commercial, and industrial metered accounts scattered across nine counties on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Since that promise, the cooperative says it has passed more than 13,000 locations statewide.
In a meeting with Worcester County Commissioners in early September, Choptank officials stated they’ve delivered fiber to 1,112 locations in Worcester County and have 471 currently active subscribers. Just about 42 percent of county residents that have access to Choptank’s fiber offerings have subscribed. The cooperative has received roughly $1 million in county funds.
Choptank provides residential customers three tiers of fiber service: symmetrical 100 megabit per second (Mbps) fiber for $85 a month; symmetrical 450 Mbps service for $100 a month; symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) service for $140 a month; and symmetrical 2.5 Gbps service for $280 a month.
Valerie Connelly, vice president of government affairs and public relations for Choptank, told Worcester County officials it’s looking at additional expansion opportunities within the area, including potentially leveraging an additional round of $1.1 million in new grant funding to extend broadband access to “difficult to reach” homes and businesses.
“It provides $1.1 million for the county to partner with Internet service providers to reach people that may have got skipped along the way because they have very long lanes and it was expensive and they didn't want to pay the $7,000 or $10,000 or $15,000 they were quoted in the past by a provider to bring service to their location,” Connelly said.
A similar presentation before the Dorchester County Council a year ago indicated that the company was also ahead of schedule on an $8.3 million project to bring fiber to the “drastically unserved” residents of that county.
Many of Choptank’s deployments have been funded by American Rescue Plan Act (APRA) money; other expansion came from acquiring service locations from Bay Country Communication as part of a partnership struck last year.
Connelly said the cooperative is also in the process of trying to obtain a portion of the $267 million in Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant money Maryland is expected to soon receive courtesy of 2021 infrastructure legislation.
“It's important that any location that is known to be unserved be identified during this process so that this grant funding money can be used to serve those locations in the future,” she said.
The Choptank Electric Cooperative was launched in 1938, following the passage of the Rural Electrification Act. Like roughly 200 of the nation’s 900 existing electric cooperatives, Choptank is now leveraging its experience in rural electrification to help fuel a much-needed rural fiber deployment renaissance nearly a century later.