A gigabit is the loneliest number

The guys at the Lamp Post Group in Chattanooga (TN) have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to bandwidth. The city boasts the first real gigabit speeds in the US, and March 1 was the deadline for folks to apply to come to the city this summer to build applications that can take advantage of the network’s awesome speeds. But there’s a problem too. The Internet is reciprocal, and without other folks with gigabit connections, Jack Studer, a managing partner at Lamp Post is wondering who the students, developers and hackers that plan to come play on the network will talk to.

Sure, the network works inside the town. Studer has described some of the ways it has changed the way he runs his business. But what happens if he tries to build apps and ship them over long haul networks? The problem is both a lack of powerful gigabit networks, but also uncertainty about what happens when a large number of people start sending traffic from Chattanooga’s networks out.