Want Gigabit Internet? You Don’t Have to Move to Kansas City.

If you want gigabit Internet speeds from your own fiber optic line, like the one that Google is offering in Kansas City, you can move to another community that also happens to straddle a state line. It’s called Bristol, and it is situated on the Virginia-Tennessee border.

On the Virginia side of the border, the local power company, Bristol Virginia Utilities, started building a fiber network for its own operations in 1999 after a nasty storm knocked out its operations. The plan was to connect eight substations with a fiber optic ring. When it turned out that adding capacity was cheap and easy, it was a no-brainer to add local government buildings and schools to the network. Bristol area schools have had access to gigabit speeds since 2000, when most schools were happy to have 1.5 megabits. The next step involved offering Internet, TV and phone services to consumers directly, but it ran up against a state law that had the effect of protecting incumbent carriers — basically Charter and Sprint.