It’s appar­ent that not all of rur­al Amer­i­ca is pre­pared to let the forces of Con­ser­vatism dri­ve them into pover­ty and feu­dal serfdom. 

The City of Chat­tanooga’s local pub­lic pow­er author­i­ty had a prob­lem a few years ago. They were plagued with pow­er out­ages. The city esti­mat­ed loss­es of about $100m annu­al­ly to local busi­ness from these out­ages. Like most small cities in the U.S., Chat­tanooga’s econ­o­my was dead in the water. The solu­tion, for the pow­er author­i­ty, was to install a fiber-optic sys­tem to com­mu­ni­cate with the dig­i­tal equip­ment on the grid. This new tech­nol­o­gy would elim­i­nate most out­ages and quick­en restora­tion times when they occurred, plus ren­der main­te­nance more effi­cient and sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er oper­at­ing costs. The plan was to build the sys­tem for $220m (the cost of an indoor shop­ping mall) financed by a local bond issue, and to fin­ish the work in ten years. Dur­ing con­struc­tion, Oba­ma’s Recov­ery Act took effect, and it turned out that they qual­i­fied for $110m of Fed­er­al mon­ey, which meant that the project could be fin­ished in three years. Now here’s the inter­est­ing part. At some point in the process (I’m not sure when), they real­ized that they were actu­al­ly build­ing a super-fast inter­net cable sys­tem, and that they could pro­vide every­one in Chat­tanooga with inter­net ser­vice run­ning at 1 gig per sec­ond —- about fifty times faster than the U.S. aver­age.  Read more »