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eridani

(51,907 posts)
Sat Jun 25, 2016, 05:33 AM Jun 2016

Chattanooga Was a Typical Postindustrial City. Then It Began Offering Municipal Broadband.

http://www.thenation.com/article/chattanooga-was-a-typical-post-industrial-city-then-it-began-offering-municipal-broadband/?nc=1

In 2010, Chattanooga became the first city in the United States to be wired by a municipality for 1 gigabit-per-second fiber-optic Internet service. Five years later, the city began offering 10 gigabit-per-second service (for comparison, Time Warner Cable’s maxes out at 300 megabits per second). That has attracted dozens of tech firms to the city that take advantage of the fast connections for things like telehealth-app development and 3D printing, and it’s given downtown Chattanooga a vibrancy rare in an age when small city centers have been emptied out by deindustrialization and the suburbs.

The feat was made possible not by a tech giant but by the city’s municipal power company, EPB, which in 2007 set out to modernize the city’s power grid, and realized it could lay every customer’s home for fiber-optic cable at the same time. The near-decade-long experiment has worked: By offering gigabit connections at $70 a month and providing discounts for low-income residents, EPB has taken tens of thousands of customers from the Internet behemoth Comcast, which offers service that is about 85 percent slower at twice the price. EPB now serves about 82,000 people, more than half of the area’s Internet market. It’s been such a success that dozens of other towns and cities have begun their own municipal broadband networks, providing faster and cheaper service than private companies.

Really, these last two years you’ve seen it pick up steam,” said Christopher Mitchell, the director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). “It’s just going to keep on spreading.”

Six years ago, Chattanooga was the only city offering publicly owned 1-gigabit Internet service. Today, over 50 communities do, according to ILSR, and there are over 450 communities in the United States offering some form of publicly owned Internet service. Many municipal networks are in small towns and rural areas where private high-speed access is hard to come by. But several dozen are in cities like Chattanooga, where there are other, private options that tend to be much more expensive and slower than what governments have proven they can provide.
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Chattanooga Was a Typical Postindustrial City. Then It Began Offering Municipal Broadband. (Original Post) eridani Jun 2016 OP
This is great news KelleyKramer Jun 2016 #1
Excellent Scientific Jun 2016 #2
But... But.... But.... krispos42 Jun 2016 #3
K&R. (nm) Elwood P Dowd Jun 2016 #4
Yes we all love it d_r Jun 2016 #5

KelleyKramer

(8,851 posts)
1. This is great news
Sat Jun 25, 2016, 06:02 AM
Jun 2016

I remember when that was launched but never heard anything else about it

Thanks for posting!

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