Internet competition in every Maryland county or city
24 counties and cities, 1,849,936 residential locations, counted block by block from the FCC's own filing. No county or city in Maryland is anywhere near a wired monopoly: not one reaches 99.5% for at most one wired company. The pressure here is entirely in the fiber column, and 25.4% of the state sits in a block where nobody reports fiber at all. The one with the best competition score still has no fiber in 0.4% of it.
The finding: the competition ranking is not what is wrong here
Our national study ranks Maryland 45 of 52 for wired competition: 26.8% of residential locations sit in a census block where at most one wired company reports service. The county or city view is where you find out what that number is actually made of, and in this state the answer is not the one North Dakota gave.
Not one Maryland county or city reaches 99.5% for at most one wired company. On the measure the national ranking is built from, this state has no monopoly geography at all, and the ranking of 45 of 52 is driven by the spread across it rather than by any one place.
That makes the second column the one to read. 25.4% of Maryland sits in a census block where nobody reports fiber, and the table below shows which counties and cities carry it. A county or city can have two or three wired companies and still have no fiber among them, which is exactly what the competition ranking cannot see.
Howard County has the best competition figure in the state at 0.6%, and 0.4% of its locations are in a block where nobody reports fiber at all. Baltimore County, the largest by locations, is 4.8% and 3.5%.
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Every Maryland county or city
Sorted by the share of residential locations in a block with at most one wired company, worst first. The first three columns are computed here from the block level filing. Gigabit is the FCC's own county or city figure, which is the finest grain they publish speed at.
| County or city | Residential locations | At most one wired company | No fiber in the block | Gigabit available | Widest reaching wired operator |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Allegany County | 28,160 | 96.5% | 84.6% | 33.4% | Breezeline (68%) |
| Calvert County | 34,517 | 91.1% | 91.1% | 53.0% | Xfinity (100%) |
| Baltimore city | 200,184 | 85.8% | 85.8% | 96.7% | Xfinity (100%) |
| Somerset County | 10,303 | 84.7% | 59.2% | 42.2% | Spectrum (44%) |
| Frederick County | 88,842 | 74.9% | 73.5% | 79.2% | Xfinity (97%) |
| Caroline County | 13,681 | 62.9% | 44.4% | 68.5% | Xfinity (79%) |
| Talbot County | 18,505 | 60.3% | 48.6% | 71.9% | Easton Velocity (87%) |
| Worcester County | 34,102 | 57.5% | 66.7% | 70.9% | Xfinity (86%) |
| Wicomico County | 38,390 | 51.8% | 48.0% | 34.9% | Xfinity (92%) |
| Garrett County | 19,058 | 48.6% | 40.3% | 49.9% | Xfinity (62%) |
| Cecil County | 41,533 | 47.7% | 44.2% | 40.2% | Xfinity (71%) |
| Carroll County | 61,227 | 44.5% | 42.1% | 70.1% | Xfinity (98%) |
| St. Mary's County | 40,671 | 38.2% | 38.1% | 42.4% | Breezeline (96%) |
| Dorchester County | 15,827 | 35.8% | 67.9% | 26.9% | Xfinity (81%) |
| Washington County | 52,986 | 31.4% | 21.1% | 72.2% | Antietam Cable (95%) |
| Charles County | 56,822 | 10.8% | 3.4% | 84.0% | Xfinity (94%) |
| Queen Anne's County | 21,535 | 10.3% | 7.3% | 75.7% | Breezeline (92%) |
| Kent County | 9,932 | 10.2% | 4.5% | 84.6% | IQ Fiber (77%) |
| Harford County | 83,557 | 8.9% | 8.2% | 37.8% | Xfinity (86%) |
| Baltimore County | 248,199 | 4.8% | 3.5% | 69.1% | Xfinity (100%) |
| Montgomery County | 239,985 | 1.4% | 1.1% | 88.7% | Xfinity (100%) |
| Prince George's County | 222,446 | 1.1% | 1.0% | 94.7% | Xfinity (100%) |
| Anne Arundel County | 182,682 | 1.0% | 1.2% | 72.2% | Verizon Fios (99%) |
| Howard County | 86,792 | 0.6% | 0.4% | 66.8% | Xfinity (100%) |
The column adds up. These 24 rows sum to 1,849,936 residential locations, and to 26.8% and 25.4%, which are the figures we publish for Maryland on the national study. The county or city rows and the state row are computed from the same blocks with the same definitions, so they cannot disagree. The build refuses to ship this page if they ever do.
Method, and what these numbers cannot tell you
Source: the FCC Broadband Data Collection, filing period D25, published July 21, 2026, reflecting service as of . Competition figures are computed across every census block in Maryland: a location counts toward the first figure when at most one company reports wireline service, meaning fiber, cable or copper, in its block. Fixed wireless and satellite are excluded from that count and stated separately elsewhere on this site.
It is a floor, not an estimate. Coverage is self reported by providers and is known to overstate, so every overstatement moves a location out of the at-most-one group and never into it. The real figure is this one or worse.
Reporting service in a block is not the same as being able to connect a given house. A company that reaches one address on a street counts for the whole block, which is why the fiber gap column can look better than any resident's experience.
The last column is reach, not market share. It names the wired operator reporting service across the largest share of the county or city's locations, with that share in brackets. It says nothing about how many people buy from them.
License
This page and its table are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Republish it, adapt it, use it commercially, in a newspaper or on a government page, provided you credit WhereFiber and link to this page. The underlying counts are facts from a public federal dataset and nobody can own them; the license covers this write-up and the arrangement of this table.
How to cite this
Horvath, F. (2026). Internet competition in every Maryland county or city: wireline provider counts by census block. WhereFiber. Retrieved from https://wherefiber.com/research/maryland-counties/
Want this for another state, or a cut we have not published? Write to contact@wherefiber.com and we will run it.
Related
- The national block level competition study, all 52 states and territories ranked
- Who can actually get gigabit internet in America, where Maryland ranks near the top
- Every provider reporting service in Maryland