Gig City, and the Network Nobody Expected a Municipal Utility to Build

In September of two thousand ten, Chattanooga became the first city in the United States to offer government-provided one-gigabit-per-second internet service to its residents. The provider was not a major telecom. It was EPB, the city's municipal electric utility, originally the Electric Power Board, which had been serving Chattanooga since nineteen thirty-nine.

EPB had been building out a smart grid, a fiber-optic network designed primarily to monitor and manage electricity delivery more efficiently. The infrastructure was already going in the ground. Someone noticed that the same fiber could carry data for residential customers at speeds that no private provider was offering anywhere in the country at the time. The city made the decision to offer it.

The gigabit service was not cheap at launch, and take-up was gradual. But the existence of the network attracted national attention and, more practically, companies and workers who needed reliable high-speed connectivity. Chattanooga began describing itself as the Gig City. Technology companies started setting up operations downtown. The city's economic transformation, already underway since the cleanup of the nineteen eighties, found a new engine.

The utility remains city-owned. The network has been expanded and upgraded since twenty-ten. By the mid-two thousand tens, EPB was marketing multi-gigabit tiers. The city that had been declared the dirtiest in America in nineteen sixty-nine and the city that first sold Coca-Cola in a bottle in eighteen ninety-nine had added a third claim to the record books. The mountain town where the rail lines converged had found a new kind of junction.