The need for speed

NOTHING drives an elected official to indignity faster than the promise of something for nothing. When Google announced that it would build a fibre-optic broadband network capable of delivering one gigabit-per-second internet—roughly 150 times the average American internet speed—to residential users in an American city, mayors lined up to debase themselves. Duluth’s jumped into a frozen lake, Sarasota’s into a shark tank. The mayor of Topeka changed his city’s name (for a day) to Google. Ultimately Google decided on Kansas City, and next month it will start providing its blazing-speed internet for $70 a month.

But that service will not be available to all Kansas Citians. Instead, Google has divided Kansas City into 204 districts (which it annoyingly insists on calling “fibrehoods”), has invited consumers who want the one-gigabit service to register in advance, and will deliver service to the 46 areas with the highest concentration of interested consumers. Only one American city offers one-gigabit internet connections to every resident, and it is not tech-savvy San Francisco or university-laden Boston, but Chattanooga, Tennessee’s fourth-largest city, nestled in the Appalachian foothills.

EPB of Chattanooga, the municipally-owned electricity company, branched out into telecoms service a little over a decade ago and soon afterwards decided to modernise the city’s power grid. Starting in 2008, with the help of $111.5m in federal stimulus funds and another $169m raised through bonds, EPB laid over 6,000 miles of fibre-optic cable. The network became fully operational last spring; it covers EPB’s full service area, roughly 170,000 homes and businesses in urban, suburban and rural areas, and it delivers video and telephone service as well.

But even though in practice someone in a trailer park on the side of a mountain could enjoy Palo-Alto-like internet speeds, relatively few Chattanoogans subscribe to the full gigabit service. EPB estimates that nine residents and two businesses pay the hefty $350-per-month charge. Most use a 30-megabit-per-second (mps) connection, which is still far faster than the American average of 6.7mps.

Even so, Harold DePriest, EPB’s boss, estimates his company’s video and internet division will become profitable this year. Mr DePriest’s case for building Chattanooga’s fibre network (and the reason EPB received its stimulus funds) had nothing to do with residential users; instead, that network forms the backbone of one of America’s most extensive municipal smart grids. And Chattanooga, a little manufacturing city that 40-odd years ago had America’s filthiest air, is reinventing itself as a haven for tech entrepreneurs—a “Silicon Holler”.

This suggests that the true benefits of municipal high-speed networks are not the consumer-friendly baubles such as high-speed video downloads, HDTV and the like, but the vast range of possibilities they open. Over the fibre network is a wireless mesh that allows government, so often wary of innovation, to try new approaches. Police in Chattanooga have vastly expanded their communications and mobile data analysis. Traffic lights will soon be able to respond in real time to changing traffic patterns. Rubbish can be collected more efficiently. EPB can avoid, or minimise, power cuts during storms, and can charge its customers more accurately and transparently. This sort of network can improve a city’s operations while broadening its tax base. Results like that are well worth a dunk in a shark tank.