Chattanooga's Innovation Culture

[Commentary] Chattanooga, a city of 170,000 persons, has the fastest Internet service in the United States. Every residence and business in a 600 square mile area has access to fiber optic Internet with symmetrical speeds up to one gigabit per second.

This Internet service is not offered by one of the major telcos and is not part of Google's gigabit Ethernet project. Rather, the service is offered by the municipal electric power company, EPB (formerly the Electric Power Board), which installed the fiber as part of its smart grid electric power management plan. EPB has no shareholders. They're not in the business of creating profit. They're in the business of serving the public. The breadth of this vision comes to life when you realize that EPB's fiber optic Internet extends to residents of trailer parks as well as to some of the farms in areas surrounding Chattanooga. If you live in a trailer park in EPB's service area, you can sign up for gigabit Ethernet with a static IP address. The cost? Less than you'd pay for a T1 line in any other city in the nation. And this is symmetrical gigabit Ethernet – more than 600 times faster than a T1 line.