Where is Baltimore's fast internet?

I was out at my father’s house in Catonsville, Baltimore County the other day using his FIOS Internet and realized that his connection at home is as fast as my corporate connection at my office downtown. This seems kind of unfair. Living in Remington in North Baltimore, I really have no good choices when it comes to Internet service. One, I can buy service from Comcast but they bundle their Internet service with sub-par and overpriced TV service (currently I have Dish Network and I believe my picture quality and channel package is a pretty good deal in comparison to what Comcast offers, not to mention Comcast has some of the worst customer service). I know a couple that currently lives in Westport and Comcast does not even offer them cable internet service (however, they do offer TV service) to their home which leaves them unreliable DSL as their only choice. Two, I can buy DSL service from Verizon, but from what my neighbors have told me the service is slow and spotty at best with frequent outages. Third, I can do Wimax , 4g, or LTE service but the services is prohibitively expensive for a heavy user of online media and the speed is not very consistent. For now (and for the past several years), I have been buying service from Believe Wireless, which no longer offers new service for new residential customers and the bandwidth to dollar ratio is very outdated.

Remember a few years ago Verizon decided to stop expanding FIOS (it’s kind of funny that it came only a couple weeks after they started negotiating with Comcast to acquire Comcast’s spare wireless spectrum). It’s also funny how Verizon rubs it in by advertising FIOS service in Baltimore but doesn’t sell it here.

There has been some buzz since Verizon’s abandonment of Maryland’s largest city. Two years ago, we tried and failed to get Google to wire Baltimore with fiber. There hasn’t been much buzz since then. I think, given that Baltimore has been shut out by the largest high-speed Internet companies, it may be time that our city shows some self-initiative in this area. There are cities around the US that have built or are building their own municipal broadband Internet service such as Chattanooga (currently building a fiber network) and Philadelphia (which has free wifi).  If we want to be on the better side of the digital divide, our city will have to go it alone. I noticed that the conversation sort of stopped around this topic a few years ago when Verizon announced that they would not bring, within the foreseeable future, FIOS to the City of Baltimore. What are your thoughts when it comes to upgrading Baltimore’s Internet infrastructure?