The Battle for High-Speed Internet

Chattanooga, Tennessee, may be best known for the Glenn Miller Orchestra’s 1941 hit, “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” But today, the city of about 173,000 people can also boast the first, most cost-effective and fastest high-speed municipal Internet in the United States.

Chattanooga’s fiber-optic Internet costs $70 a month¹ and connects users at one gigabit per second (Gbps)—50 times the average speed of the rest of the U.S.—putting it on a par with Hong Kong, which has the fastest Internet in the world.² To put that in perspective, it takes about 25 minutes to...

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