State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

New P3s May Finally Bridge the Digital Divide

Governing: Andrew Dean remembers counting down to “Ting Day.” That was the day in December 2014 when Dean’s Maryland software business was getting hooked up to the kind of high-speed Internet that most Americans only dream about. Ting, the company that would replace Comcast as the office’s Internet service provider, offered a new fiber-optic connection that promised to be incredibly fast: a gigabit per second. That’s about 26 times faster than the average U.S. Internet connection. Gigabit fiber is so fast that users can download a full-length, high-definition movie file in two minutes and can watch five video streams at the same time. A user can upload a file to the cloud faster than she can save it to a thumb drive attached to her computer. For Dean and his co-workers, Ting Day couldn’t come soon enough.

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