{"id":898801,"date":"2026-10-29T14:08:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T14:08:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/898801\/"},"modified":"2026-10-29T14:08:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T14:08:14","slug":"how-chattanooga-built-some-of-americas-best-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/898801\/","title":{"rendered":"How Chattanooga built some of America\u2019s best internet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most Americans hate their cable companies<\/a>. But not the 200,000-odd residents of Chattanooga, Tennessee, a city nestled in the Appalachian foothills.<\/p>\n

For many people, the city might seem off the beaten path \u2014 enough so that when Spain\u2019s national team chose the city as their base during the FIFA World Cup over the summer, the internet exploded<\/a> with jeers of incredulity. And yet, as many an urban planner, and certainly many a local, will tell you, Chattanooga is a special place, known not just because the Glenn Miller Orchestra immortalized it as a scenic hub for the choo-choo train<\/a>.<\/p>\n

No, what really has put Chattanooga on the map recently is its ridiculously fast, municipally owned internet.<\/p>\n

Chattanooga, Tennessee, is home to some of the fastest, most beloved broadband in the nation.It\u2019s all thanks to the city\u2019s publicly owned internet network, which has been linked to billions of dollars in economic benefits since coming online in 2010.Hundreds of other cities have followed suit in the years since, but many others have been stymied by opposition from major cable companies.And that\u2019s a shame, because if every city was like Chattanooga, our internet could be so much better than it is now.<\/p>\n

Unlike almost everywhere else in the country, the fiber-optic cables that keep much of Chattanooga online were laid neither by Comcast nor Spectrum, but by the city itself. In a $220 million<\/a> gamble, its public power utility, EPB, has helped transform the once struggling post-industrial city into an<\/a> unlikely<\/a> marvel<\/a> of<\/a> civic<\/a> reinvention<\/a>, and an inspiration for many other dozens of copycat towns around the country.<\/p>\n

When it debuted in 2010<\/a>, at one gigabit per second, the city\u2019s ultra-speedy broadband was among the fastest in the world, as fast as global meccas like Hong Kong, and over 200 times faster than the average top-tier offering across the US. \u201cThis makes Chattanooga, a mid-sized city in the South,\u201d declared then-Mayor Ron Littlefield to the New York Times<\/a>, \u201cone of the leading cities in the world in its digital capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the decade and a half since Chattanooga rebranded as \u201cGig City,\u201d its trademark broadband has proved to be far more than a mere fancy gimmick. It has added billions of dollars to the city\u2019s economy, lured in hundreds of new startups, and, according to EPB, become the single largest source of funding<\/a> for local public schools, and delighted hundreds of thousands of local customers.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re not a tech company or a prolific streamer, of course, you may not need such intensive internet service. But the city\u2019s broadband service is widely beloved locally for bringing 70 percent of households<\/a> online at, by far, the lowest price per megabit of bandwidth in the area and quite possibly, among the lowest in the country. Consumer Reports perennially ranks EPB<\/a> among America\u2019s best providers, a sentiment apparently shared by the legions of Chattanoogans who take to social media to sing EPB\u2019s praises every time it swoops in to fix an outage<\/a> minutes after a storm hits, or bemoan their loss<\/a> when they move away and witness the sludgy pace at \u2014 and high rates \u2014 which the rest of us browse and scroll.<\/p>\n

\u201dChattanooga turned out better than anyone could have hoped,\u201d said Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative, part of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a group that researches locally owned infrastructure, \u201cand the one thing that hasn\u2019t changed are their prices. It\u2019s rare, remarkable even.\u201d That original single-gig service runs $68 per month, and faster speeds aren\u2019t too much more.<\/p>\n

But even as the benefits of Chattanooga\u2019s internet supremacy have compounded, public broadband networks like it are still a rarity across the US<\/a>, which you probably already know if you, like most Americans, have ever sensed your internet growing ever more lethargic<\/a>, even as your fees climb<\/a> month after month.<\/p>\n

There is a better way, and Chattanooga has long since shown the nation how. For<\/a> better<\/a> or<\/a> worse<\/a>, the internet drives much of our daily lives and the economy, and what makes the internet possible? Broadband, which is powered by those stiff plastic-sheathed cables filled with strands of thin glass or braids of copper wire, beaming pulses of light or electricity into your modem. And yet, the US has outsourced the provision of this precious public good almost entirely to de facto monopolies<\/a> that keep our internet slower, more expensive, and above all, more infuriating than it needs to be.<\/p>\n

\u201dThere was a generation that built water systems and electric systems. There was a generation that built the roads,\u201d Mitchell said. Today, however, \u201cPeople are just afraid of the idea of the government being ambitious and doing what Chattanooga did.\u201d<\/p>\n

How Chattanooga built the world\u2019s best broadband<\/p>\n

Long before Chattanooga grew famous for its broadband, it was known, for a period of time, as \u201cthe dirtiest city of America,\u201d a moniker bestowed by Walter Cronkite in 1969.<\/p>\n

According to local lore, the moon pie, which originated at a bakery in Chattanooga, came to be when a coal miner asked for a snack \u201cas big as the moon<\/a>\u201d to sustain him for long shifts down the shaft. The coal he mined fueled the industrial boom that defined Chattanooga until the mid-20th century, when the city\u2019s factories, furnaces, and railroads belched a smog so noxious, it melted women\u2019s nylon stockings<\/a> off their legs as they walked.<\/p>\n

By the 1980s, the city knew it needed to change, seeding a hunger for reinvention that experts told me would come to define its municipally-owned internet. By the 2000s, Chattanooga had more than cleaned up its air and its reputation, building a huge aquarium in the heart of downtown and carefully revitalizing<\/a> its riverfront and natural areas. But in the early aughts, with the remaining heavy industry in deep retreat, and a fragile recovery threatened by the Great Recession<\/a>, the city craved a new economic engine.<\/p>\n

\"An<\/a><\/p>\n

A view of Chattanooga\u2019s revitalized riverfront. Kevin Wurm for The Washington Post via Getty Images<\/p>\n

The city\u2019s EPB, which originated as a municipally owned electric utility in 1935, had already set out to build a smart electrical grid in 2008, retrofitting it with a two-way digital communications system that could detect and fix problems as they arise. This process would involve laying hundreds of miles of new fiber-optic cable lines along existing power lines, monitoring them and relaying information back and forth with operators. But as the EPB laid plans for its new grid-helping fiber, it realized that for roughly the same amount of effort and cost, it could repurpose those cables to also serve as a cutting-edge internet service.<\/p>\n

Laying those hundreds of miles of new cables, along every single power line in the city, is an expensive and time-consuming process. But since EPB already had power lines plugging into almost every home and business throughout the city, it didn\u2019t even need permission to get it done. And once the cables are there, there\u2019s no real limit on how much data they can carry, meaning that they\u2019ll work just as well whether they\u2019re relaying the power grid\u2019s data exclusively or if they\u2019re carrying petabytes upon petabytes of data from hundreds of thousands of internet customers. This same quality has made it easy for EPB to pump up the volume of data it offers over the years, eventually allowing it to become the first city in the nation to offer a 25-gigabit-per-second<\/a> service, which it did for its customers in 2023. More recently, EPB became the first provider nationwide to hook its fiber-optic cables up to a quantum computer \u2014 which uses advanced physics to solve mind-bogglingly complex problems \u2014 and offer its use to researchers and customers across the city.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we\u2019re going to own that fiber communications network to help automate our grid, why not offer that as a service to our customers? We thought, \u2018Why not go big? Why not be ambitious?\u2019\u201d Janet Rehberg, CEO of EPB, told me. \u201cPeople thought we were crazy. And we said, \u2018If we can do it, why not?\u2019 So, we did.\u201d<\/p>\n

Equipped with a $111 million federal stimulus grant from the recession-era American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, plus about $222 million in municipal bonds, EPB was able to complete the project \u2014 initially expected to take a decade \u2014 in just two years.<\/p>\n

\"EPB<\/a><\/p>\n

An EPB worker installing fiber-optic cables in Chattanooga in 2009. Courtesy of EPB<\/p>\n

In 2010, Chattanooga became the first city in the nation to offer one-gigabit-per-second fiber optic internet.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was a huge shift for our city\u2019s fortunes,\u201d Andy Berke, mayor of Chattanooga from 2013 to 2021, told me. \u201cAll of a sudden, we were a place where you could try to discover the next big thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hundreds of startups flocked to the city<\/a> for its super-fast broadband, with tech incubators setting up shop in shuttered storefronts<\/a> and abandoned industrial factories<\/a> dotted along the city\u2019s downtown. In its first 10 years, EPB\u2019s fiber network brought more than $5.3 billion in economic benefits and 10,420 jobs to the city, about 31 percent of all jobs created during that period, according to a study<\/a> by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. This has transformed \u201cthe way we thought about ourselves and what we thought was possible technologically,\u201d Berke said.<\/p>\n

The broadband investment has long since paid for itself and then some in the fees people pay to access its service. EPB expects to earn about $190 million over the next year alone from its telecommunications and enormously popular internet service, all of which will flow back into the business itself or into the city. As a result, EPB chose not to increase electricity rates<\/a> at all this year, in stark contrast<\/a> to much of the rest of the country. And the utility now pays tens of millions of dollars annually straight back into city services, like public schools.<\/p>\n

Under Berke\u2019s mayoral administration, the city also integrated EPB into initiatives<\/a> meant to get more Chattanoogans online. When the pandemic hit, and local schools went virtual, the city built a new program called EdConnect that saw EPB provide free internet to every family with a child who received free or reduced lunches, the first program of its kind<\/a> nationwide, and one that continues to this day.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of communities set up something similar during the pandemic, but most of those are done, they kind of faded away. But we made a commitment \u2014 our community did \u2014 for 10 years, and we\u2019re already discussing what the next 10 years looks like,\u201d said Sammy Lowdermilk, CEO of the Enterprise Center, the nonprofit that administers EdConnect. \u201cWe\u2019ve heard from parents using online resources to look for a job, to create resumes, to do medical research. The entire family gets to benefit from it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Your city could have Chattanooga\u2019s internet. It just has to try.<\/p>\n

Over the years, Chattanooga\u2019s publicly owned internet has drawn countless city planners and far-flung mayors to Tennessee\u2019s fourth-largest city to learn just how they pulled it off.<\/p>\n

But every time one visited Berke in his time in office, and every time he gave one of his \u201clittle sales pitches\u201d on EPB\u2019s success, over and over, they\u2019d replied with the same refrain: \u201cOh, it\u2019s incredible what you\u2019ve done here. I mean, we can\u2019t do it, but it\u2019s great \u2014 good for you guys,\u201d he recalled. Many cities don\u2019t have a publicly owned electricity company at the ready as Chattanooga did, and many face significant barriers from state laws that restrict or heavily discourage the development of municipally owned broadband altogether.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe number one challenge for most infrastructure projects is political. It\u2019s not financial. It\u2019s not conceptual. It\u2019s not technological. It\u2019s the web of difficulties that make it harder to get it done.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Andy Berke, former mayor of Chattanooga<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, some places tried anyway, and many have succeeded \u2014 over 700 of them, according to Mitchell\u2019s last count. In Utah, for example, a consortium of cities has spent the past few decades building out a municipally owned fiber network with the bold name Utopia. For many years, said Mitchell, the network suffered from severe financial and legal roadblocks. But even so, Utopia has managed to build out a system that Mitchell calls an \u201cunqualified success\u201d today, bringing tens of thousands of households online across the state.<\/p>\n

While only a tiny fraction of all broadband networks nationwide have some level of municipal ownership, strikingly, nine out of ten of the nation\u2019s fastest broadband networks<\/a> do or are part of a public-private partnership.<\/p>\n

However, Chattanooga\u2019s brand of municipally owned broadband hasn\u2019t spread nearly as widely as many people hoped it would<\/a>, or think it could. And most of that, said Mitchell, can be attributed to the fact that large internet companies like Comcast or AT&T, clearly aware of how dominant well-run municipally owned networks can become, have spent the past several decades fighting to prevent more from coming online.<\/p>\n

More than 12 states now have explicit laws<\/a> barring or restricting cities from offering publicly owned broadband, which has made it difficult for many municipalities to create networks of their own. Even Chattanooga faced a brutal legal challenge<\/a> when it tried to expand EPB\u2019s coverage to rural and underserviced areas right outside of the city, the result of a 1999 state law meant to restrict municipally owned broadband access.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe number one challenge for most infrastructure projects is political. It\u2019s not financial. It\u2019s not conceptual. It\u2019s not technological,\u201d said Berke, but rather, it\u2019s a matter of navigating the special interests and lobbyists that dominate the status quo. \u201cIt\u2019s the web of difficulties that make it harder to get it done.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that doesn\u2019t mean that it\u2019s impossible to pull off. Utopia, for example, has withstood a blitz of dark money attack ads<\/a> likely bankrolled by cable companies in its effort to expand across the state. And in Colorado, hundreds of communities over the years across the state have voted to opt out of a 2005 law banning municipal broadband networks. This momentum ultimately proved strong enough to convince the state legislature to repeal the original ban<\/a> in 2023.<\/p>\n

Even today, broadband remains out of reach in many parts of the country that are either too rural for for-profit networks<\/a> to build there at all, or where it does exist, locals can\u2019t afford it. Americans consistently pay more for slower service<\/a>, compared with their counterparts in Europe or Asia.<\/p>\n

\"EPB\u2019s<\/a><\/p>\n

EPB now hosts the nation\u2019s first quantum computing network. Courtesy of EPB<\/p>\n

Combined, those barriers have left tens of millions of American households<\/a> without internet access. With AI poised to further transform our economy, Chattanooga, it seems increasingly clear, could be among the first few cities outside of Silicon Valley to truly benefit<\/a> from the biggest technological shift in generations, while many other post-industrial cities seem likely to fall even further behind because they don\u2019t have the right digital infrastructure to thrive in the economy today.<\/p>\n

Quietly chugging along on the banks of the Tennessee River, the city is making a case that states and cities should take broadband seriously as a transformational infrastructure that underpins our modern lives much the way the rail lines did in the 19th century or highways did a century later.<\/p>\n

Luckily, there are now hundreds of models \u2014 from fully public utilities like EPB to Tribal-built broadband networks<\/a> to public-private partnerships \u2014 for cities hoping to carve a publicly owned path to a better internet themselves. Laying coils of fiber-optic cables is still much cheaper and, lawsuits notwithstanding, far easier a feat than building a new highway system or a railway network. But even if it were harder, Chattanooga shows that it would be worth doing. \u201cProjects that are most difficult are also the most rewarding,\u201d as Berke put it. \u201cYou have to be willing to take on the status quo \u2014 that\u2019s what can transform a community.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Swati Sharma<\/p>\n

Vox Editor-in-Chief<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Most Americans hate their cable companies. But not the 200,000-odd residents of Chattanooga, Tennessee, a city nestled in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":898802,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[29584,174,376666,28419,74],"class_list":["post-898801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-internet","tag-future-perfect","tag-internet","tag-nice-things","tag-tech-policy","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=898801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898801\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/898802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=898801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=898801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=898801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}