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

[L. Coyote]

Chattanooga’s publicly owned Internet service has helped boost its economy and bridge the digital divide.
By Peter Moskowitz --- June 3, 2016

Downtown Chattanooga looks like a lot of postindustrial cities: wide streets, a mix of old brick buildings, and uninspired ’60s-era brutalism. Except there’s something here that many small downtowns do without these days: people. And many of them are here not just for the usual accoutrements of your average gentrified downtown—fancy restaurants, condos, and concert venues (though those do exist here), but for something more basic, and arguably much more important: the Internet.

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, ..................

[MontanaMama]

1. Broadband internet

is part of the commons in many parts of the industrialized world.

[dawg day]

2. I wish my town would do this.

It's also a way to attract tourists and business visitors.
And it really is time to start to acknowledge that Internet should be treated like a public utility like electricity.

Net neutrality.

[marble falls]

3. And we in Marble Falls get DSL the kick off about every twenty minutes.

[Hortensis]

4. Federal law was passed prohibiting municipal broadband.

I'm not actually sure of the status of this with all the changes. At least 20 states have passed laws prohibiting it, though. Republicans "getting off the back of business," of course, as conservatives proudly put it everywhere they gathered all through most of the '80s and '90s.

On the bright side, if net neutrality is not restored a huge impetus will have been created for municipal delivery of internet service as a basic utility. And perhaps even if it is.

[Glorfindel]

5. And Chattanooga's EPB is part of the New Deal TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority)

Evil, Federal-Government-controlled entity! When I point this out to my Repuke cousins who live in Chattanooga, I get blank stares. They also enjoy boating and fishing on the TVA lakes. I'm a bad person for even thinking this, but why not privatize the TVA and let its customers start enjoying the benefits of free enterprise like the rest of us? "Benefits" like much, much higher electric bills and vastly increased fees for access to socialized lakes.

https://www.tva.gov/Energy/Public-Power-Partnerships/Local-Power-Companies/EPB-Chattanooga