Montgomery County Maryland Recognized For Broadband Equity Efforts

Montgomery County Install

Montgomery County Maryland has been awarded the “Best Municipal or Public Connectivity Program,” honored as a 2024 Broadband Nation Award winner for its ongoing efforts to expand affordable broadband access and help bridge the digital divide.

Montgomery County has worked extensively for years to connect municipal services and key anchor institutions, but more recently has begun leveraging that infrastructure to expand access to the most vulnerable. The county’s efforts have two key components:

FiberNet is a 650-mile municipal fiber communication network that provides broadband services to 558 County, State, municipal, educational, and anchor institutions.

MoCoNet is the County’s residential broadband network that provides free 300/300 megabit per second (Mbps) Internet service for residents at affordable housing locations. Originally providing a symmetrical 100 Mbps service, the network was recently upgraded to 300 Mbps, and is currently available to low-income housing communities.

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Montgomery County cow in field with tall buildings in background

Montgomery Connects Program Director Mitsuko Herrera tells ILSR that the county just received a $10 million grant from the State of Maryland to expand FiberNet and MoCoNet’s free 300 Mbps offering to 1,547 low-income and affordable housing units at seven properties operated by the County’s Housing Opportunities Commission.

The county’s also in the middle of upgrading its core fiber infrastructure to deliver significantly faster overall speeds.  

“We are preparing to implement an upgrade of the DWDM (dense wave division multiplexing) fiber optic networking technology within FiberNet, the County's communications network,” Herrera said.

“This infrastructure modernization initiative will allow us to increase the maximum capacity of FiberNet from 10 Gbps [gigabit per second] to scale to 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps over time as demand for services to schools, libraries, government, and affordable housing increases in the years ahead.”

Efforts Can Only Partially Replace The Loss Of FCC ACP Program

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Montgomery County connectivity map

The county’s efforts are particularly useful given the recent expiration of the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). The popular program provided a $30 discount off of broadband access for low-income families that qualified, but expired last April after House Republicans blocked ongoing efforts to finance continued operation.

“The MoCoNet projects are helpful to the people residing in selected affordable housing developments,” Herrera said.

"However," he added, "it is not a substitute for a federal and state broadband subsidy solution.”

Herrera notes that there were over 28,000 Montgomery County families at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty guidelines, or enrolled in Medicaid, SNAP, or free or reduced school lunch in Montgomery County who also enrolled in ACP as of January 2024.

But, according to the United Way's United For ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) data, households in Montgomery County need to earn between 320 percent and 390 percent of the federal poverty guideline to meet basic monthly costs, depending on family size, age, and childcare assistance requirements.

Or, as Herrera puts it:

“There could be twice as many families who need broadband subsidies as the number who enrolled in ACP, but even after network expansion, MoCoNet will only serve a fraction of this need.”

Still, Montgomery County credits its network infrastructure for a wide variety of other local benefits, including greater communications system resiliency in the face of a destabilized climate, improved response times to cybersecurity incidents, a significant boost to regional medical and education opportunities – particularly for the county’s most vulnerable communities.

"Superfast FiberNet infrastructure benefits the County and our ability to serve businesses and boost economic development,” County Executive Marc Elrich said in the wake of the county’s recent award.

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Montgomery County connectivity map 2

“Our commitment to closing the digital divide is a cornerstone of our work to ensure equity and that every resident, regardless of their background or income, has access to high-quality internet service,” Elrich added.

Grant Fueled Alternatives To Consolidated Monopoly Power

A 2021 report by the Department Of County services found that Montgomery suffers the same fate as many U.S. broadband markets; namely a lack of competition resulting in high prices, slow speeds, and spotty access.

Much of the county is dominated by Comcast, which sees little serious incentive to compete on speeds, availability, price, or customer service. Elsewhere sees a combination of Verizon fiber and DSL, or expensive and capped satellite broadband service. Entrenched giants have routinely been found to engage in broadband deployment and pricing discrimination.

The county’s report mirrors another common concern: that federal broadband mapping data routinely overstates real-world broadband availability, forcing the county to take additional time and resources to more granularly measure broadband access.

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Montgomery County utility lines in snow

New data from the Census Bureau’s Local Estimates of Internet Adoption (LEIA) program indicates that Montgomery County has broadband adoption rates exceeding 85 percent. And while that’s better than the rates below 60 percent seen in Maryland counties like Allegany and Garrett, affordability – and access to next-generation speeds past 100 Mbps – remain an issue.

“Montgomery County’s biggest challenge in applying for rural grants as an urban‐suburban‐rural county has been to get grant reviewers to accept that one‐third of the County is rural, and to not be disqualified by the definition of 'rural' in grant application requirements,” the county’s 2021 report found.

In 2019, Montgomery County successfully lobbied the Maryland General Assembly to amend State law to make the rural parts of Montgomery, Prince George’s and Howard Counties eligible for State rural broadband grant funding.

Since then, grants have helped kickstart numerous county initiatives, Herrera said.

“FiberNet received $1.2 million in ARPA funds for network infrastructure and the $10.2 million Maryland Public Housing Grant is funded by a combination of ARPA and Capital Project Funds,” she noted. “ARPA is also being used to provide up to $1.1 million – maximum $8,000 per property – to fund extension of Comcast facilities up long driveways, largely in the rural 28% of the county.”

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Montgomery County group pic for award

The County has also secured $41.8 million in FCC Emergency Connectivity Fund (ECF) and Maryland Emergency Education Relief (MEER) funding to purchase 110,000 Chromebook laptops, and $1.3 million in MEER funding for 1,000 Dell Laptops with Office365 for use by organizations at their facilities or by staff serving K-12 students and their families.

It also received $150,000 from Maryland's portion of federal Covid-relief health funding administered by the County’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to provide digital skills training and computer distribution to older adults in senior housing.

The state of Maryland is also poised to receive $267 million in BEAD (Broadband Equity Access and Deployment) broadband grants in the new year made possible by the 2021 infrastructure bill. A segment of that funding may also be leveraged to aid Montgomery’s innovative efforts to shore up access and bridge the country’s stubborn digital divide.

Header image of cow in field courtesy of Montgomery County Rural Broadband Report 2021

Inline images courtesy of Montgomery County Rural Broadband Report 2021

Inline group photo of Montgomery County officials courtesy of Montgomery County Office of Broadband Programs