ROCKPORT — Monday afternoon, Aug. 11, U.S. Senator Angus King will be at Maine Media Workshops in Rockport for a press conference announcing the launch of the first municipally-owned ultra-fast Internet network in Maine.

Susan P. Crawford, who served as President Barack Obama’s Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy, will also be on hand. She is the author of “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age,” in which she suggests that high-speed Internet access in the U.S. is as essential as electricity, but is currently too slow and too expensive.

Thirty countries have faster Internet speeds than the U.S., and a recent study ranked Maine 49 out of 50 states for Internet access and quality, said a press release from King’s office.

The new network in Rockport is a gigabit per second network, meaning it can transmit 1,000 megabits of data per second. It is also symmetrical, meaning a customer can upload data to the Internet just as fast as downloading.

In Maine, it is common for download speeds to be 15 megabits per second or less, and for upload speeds to be 1 megabit per second or less.