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 »