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.Continue reading