Debby Williams, a certified public accountant, bought what she thought would be a dream 3-acre home in southern Bradley County in 1978 to raise and home school her three children.
But she discovered the rural area – served by Volunteer Electric Cooperative for power and Verizon for telephone – lacks any broadband telecommunication connections for her to do her accounting work or for her children to effectively take Internet education courses. When she decided to move to get better Internet links, she quickly found out the value of high-speed broadband service to prospective homeowners as well.
“We had three offers for our house fall through after the buyers realized we didn’t have any broadband service,” Williams recalled. “We finally sold our house (in 2012) for $50,000 less than the original offers we had. Not having broadband is not not debilitating for doing remote work or online education, it cost us a tremendous amount of money.”
Williams was among more than 200 rural Hamilton and Bradley county residents who packed a fire training center in Ooltewah Thursday night to organize support for legislation to allow EPB and other municipal broadband suppliers to expand their high-speed Internet service beyond their TVA-designated power service territory.
EPB this month introduced one of the world’s first residential 10 gigabit-per-second Internet service plans across its 600-square-mile service territory, which includes 170,000 homes and businesses in most of Hamilton County and parts of Marion, Catoosa and Walker counties. But more than 8,500 homes in northern Hamilton County lack the ultra high-speed Internet service because they are outside of EPB’s service territory. EPB is statutorily barred from serving those rural areas.