I practically did a spit take while drinking my coffee this morning and reading The New York Times story about a municipal broadband project in Tennessee. I learned that Chattanooga’s community owned power provider, EPB, has plans to offer up to 1 Gigabit per second to its fiber-to-the-home subscribers by the end of the year. True, that can cost you almost $350 per year (lower if you bundle in voice and video).
I checked some of the pricing of their various service bundles—a classic triple-play of voice, video, and data—on the EPB website, and the packages are quite competitive: 30 Mbps data, enhanced video, and voice for $111.
This is a big win for non-profit fiber projects nationwide. And possibly a leading candidate for winning Google’s Fiber for Communities contest to build and test an ultra-high speed network.
By the way, it appears that Comcast was at one point the sole broadband and cable video provider for Chattanooga.
In recent years, Tennessee has been the scene of battling between the cable companies—the usual suspects—and AT&T. At issue was the Competitive Cable and Video Services Act, which would move franchising authority to the state level for new contracts. The entrenched cable operators were against it, and AT&T had an interest in negotiating with a single state-level department than with individual municipalities for its U-Verse. The legislation was finally passed in 2008.
With that victory, AT&T announced in July it is offering its copper-based U-Verse service to Chattanooga.
And now EPB has upped the ante with its Gigabit level broadband.
Competition is a beautiful thing.
Related articles by Zemanta
- EPB Fiber Service Bundlings (epbfi.com)
- Fastest Net Service in U.S. Coming to Chattanooga ( nytimes.com)
- Royal rumble on Capitol Hill over cable bill (nashvillepost.com)
- AT&T brings U-Verse to Chattanooga market (fiercevoip.com)
