So I’ve had some time today to digest Baltimore’s application to Google for its Fiber for Communities project, the ultra-fast broadband network the Internet giant plans to build. Did you know there were 1,959 apartment complexes in the city with an average of 50 units, and not one gated community?

Neither did I, but the document — posted today on the Bmore Fiber Web site — contains all sorts of nuggets like that. It trumpets Baltimore’s virtues pretty loudly (“Baltimore’s per-capita income is today growing faster than in any other metropolitan area in the country.”) while brushing quickly past any shortcomings (“Like all American cities, we also face challenges.”)

It also lays out a pretty coherent and compelling narrative hinging on three key features organizers say set Baltimore apart:

1.    Great applications
2.    Greater project control
3.    Strong beachhead

That third feature is interesting, and something I didn’t think to pursue in my own reporting (darn it!) on the effort. Baltimore hopes to convince Google that building its broadband network here could give the company a “beachhead for visibility and expansion of this prototype project given its location within the Northeast U.S. corridor and the Washington-Baltimore metro area (with the nation’s highest concentration of IT workers).”

Check it out and tell us what you think. And coffee’s on me for the first person who can tell me the number of utility poles owned or controlled by the city.

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I wonder if Baltimore’s having thoughts about being the “serious city.”

That’s the name local Google czar Tom Loveland gave Baltimore and its grassroots effort to become home to an ultra-fast broadband network built by Google at a cost of an estimated hundreds of millions of dollars.

Actually, I’m pretty sure Loveland, Dave Troy, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and other local organizers aren’t having any second thoughts at all. They’ve prided themselves on avoiding stunts in their quest to capture the attention of the Web giant, instead relying on reams of data and rounding up sober testimonials from a who’s who of elected officials and business and nonprofit leaders.

Still, it’s hard not to feel a twinge of jealousy over today’s April Fool’s Day turn of events: Google renames itself “Topeka” in a tip of the hat to the Kansas city that said it would name itself after the Mountain View, Calif.-based company in a bid for its broadband affections.

It’s of course been reported across the country and locally.

Google also blogged about it.

“We didn’t reach this decision lightly; after all, we had a fair amount of brand equity tied up in our old name. But the more we surfed around (the former) Topeka’s municipal website, the more kinship we felt with this fine city at the edge of the Great Plains.”

And another Baltimore institution made national news today for an April Fool’s stunt, this one also involving a name.

This all makes me think I should change my name. How does “Steve Jobs” grab you?

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Once again Baltimore is choosing earnest sincerity over publicity stunts in hopes of grabbing Google’s attention.

No city name changes. No hiring sky writers to fly over the Mountain View, Calif., campus of the search engine giant. No diving into a National Aquarium tank with a dolphin renamed “Google” (we didn’t do that, did we?).

The latest pitch for Google to build a multimillion-dollar ultra-fast network in Charm City comes courtesy of philanthropist George Soros, whose Open Society Institute has an office here in town. Baltimore Sun columnist Jay Hancock namedropped Soros in a recent column, and several media outlets around town have been reporting for days that the billionaire investor would be part of the effort.

Soros issued a news release today urging Google to pick Baltimore as the field site for its fiber-to-the-home network. More than 600 cities and municipalities submitted a request for information, or RFI, to Google by its March 26 deadline.

Soros deftly straddles the line between trumpeting Baltimore’s assets — world-class research institutions, a unique arts community — and highlighting the city’s challenges. Namely the “failing schools, untreated drug addiction, and an over-reliance on incarceration” that prompted Soros to locate an Open Society Institute office here in 1998 and invest $70 million in a variety of programs.

“OSI-Baltimore’s efforts to develop a trained workforce, keep children and youth engaged in schools and in after-school programs, expand access to addiction treatment, and increase access to public benefits and training would be greatly enhanced through the tools enabled by Google Fiber,” said OSI-Baltimore Director Diana Morris in a statement. “In addition, we applaud Google’s intentions to make this an ‘open access network,’ which will further promote the principals of net-neutrality and open society values.”

This warts-and-all approach probably makes some local stakeholders wince, but it’s bound to resonate with a company sporting the unofficial motto “Don’t Be Evil.” If Google wants to do some good, perhaps it will see the same things that Soros and his Open Society team saw back in 1998 — strong community institutions “but still many people who suffer from being disconnected from important resources,” as Soros put it.

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As Facebook status updates go it was pretty typical.

“Another all-nighter,” it read. “I’m a slow writer. With high standards.”

But this post came courtesy of Baltimore’s “Google czar” — Tom Loveland, CEO of Mind Over Machines and a tech industry leader in the region. So his status update sent a signal that the city’s heavy lifting in its bid to become the home of a multimillion-dollar broadband network financed and built by Google was in the home stretch.

Google’s deadline for the RFI, or request for information, from interested cities is tomorrow. After the final blitz of i-dotting and t-crossing is complete, the coalition of Baltimore high-tech entrepreneurs, city agencies, businesses and nonprofits will have to sit back and wait.

They’re feeling pretty good about the case they’ve put forward.

“We didn’t just stress ‘how badly we want this,’ we built a concise, logical and detailed case for why Google should want us,” high-tech entrepreneur Dave Troy wrote on his blog today.

Among the assets the Baltimore group is highlighting, according to Troy’s post:

• A city-owned and operated conduit system running under the streets, which would enable Google to deploy a network faster and at lower cost.

• A pledge from billionaire financier George Soros (whose Open Society Institute has an office here) to support a Google investment with programs to help bridge the digital divide, a push endorsed by city schools CEO Andres Alonso in an early Web video testimonial.

• Talks that are underway with Bob Kahn, a co-inventor of the TCP/IP networking standard, on new ways to archive and share municipal data.

Local organizers were heading to City Hall this afternoon to give a final review of the RFI and then hold a possible “button-pushing ceremony” to transmit the document electronically to Google’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

Stay tuned, we’ll post more when we know it.

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Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley has thrown his official support behind Baltimore’s effort to be a test market for an ultra-fast broadband network being developed by Google. The governor offered his endorsement Monday via YouTube, which is owned by the search giant.

Think Baltimore has a chance?

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What will the ultra-fast network powering Google broadband cost to build?

Bloomberg has an answer: “Hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to Richard Whitt, the search giant’s D.C. counsel on telecommunications and media issues.

Much will depend on the size of the network, how many customers it serves and how Google will deliver the high-speed service to residences — in wires strung directly to homes or buried underground. Organizers behind Baltimore’s effort to be a test market for the network were thinking the buildout would cost $1 billion or more, a substantial investment in Charm City’s information infrastructure.

That number was based on the cost per subscriber Verizon shelled out to build its FiOS network. Verizon spent about $10,000 per customer building its $23 billion fiber network. An analyst quoted by Bloomberg thinks Google will spend $3,000 to $8,000 per home on the network. Google’s goal of reaching 50,000 to 500,000 customers would put its price tag at anywhere from $60 million to $1.6 billion.

Google says the network will deliver Web access speeds of 1 gigabit per second, more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today.

The Sun’s Jay Hancock, while analyzing Baltimore’s assets as the competition heats up to win Google over, used what he called a more conservative “tens of millions” figure in his writeup on the local grassroots effort.

That effort continues to gain steam. BmoreFiber.com now boasts 764 people and 85 organizations signing up to support the push. And this morning the effort and Web address got a national plug courtesy of Mario Armstrong, who deftly worked in a quick shout-out during an NPR “Morning Edition” segment on national broadband policy with host Steve Inskeep.

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