How Chattanooga beat Google Fiber by half a decade

They may not realize it, but some high-end Internet subscribers in Chattanooga (TN) will turn on their computers and start browsing the Web at a gigabit per second — 10 times the speeds they're used to. By month's end, some 39,000 area residents will see their mid-tier connections become twice as fast — from a current 50 megabits per second to 100. Better yet, the majority of these customers won't pay a penny for the upgrade. For that, city residents have an unlikely business to thank: the publicly-owned electric utility. Municipal governments have taken it upon themselves to build their own versions of Google Fiber. It's a model that's proven successful for Chattanooga.