The skyline of downtown Chattanooga bathes in mid-evening sunlight.Of all the honors and accolades that have come to Chattanooga in recent years, arguably the most significant is the city’s inclusion in the annual list of seven finalists for the Intelligent Community Forum’s award as the “Intelligent Community of the Year.” To its credit, the city seems to hold a good chance of winning the top award.
This competitive international honor recognizes communities around the globe that are excelling in development and broad community use of high-speed Internet access to build and strengthen their economic prosperity, civic infrastructure and successful engagement in the new global economy.
Those are, admittedly, huge and seemingly quixotic goals. But they are being achieved here in myriad ways that, taken together, spur innovation, create new higher-technology jobs, foster the information-technology skills to help students and adults qualify for those jobs, and advance computer literacy and civic engagement among citizens of all ages and economic levels to help them explore meaningful ways to improve their lives.
Much of our community’s Internet, or broadband, capacity rests on the EPB’s nation-leading foundation in the building the first communitywide gigabit passive optical network in America.
No other community in the country has matched EPB’s quiet achievement. Indeed, most U.S. communities – with Internet speeds of 3 to 30 Mpbs, or Mega bytes per second – would be happy to have access to a broadly available bandwidth of 100 Mpbs. EPB, by contrast, has already installed a fiber-optic network that enables it to offer up to 1,000 Mpbs – a full gigabit – to all of its 170,000 residential and business customers.