Tennessee

Chattanooga's city-owned fiber network (via the City electric utility) is now ten years old, and they have published some results. The Gigabit fiber network delivered, on average, $261 Million PER YEAR in new jobs, retained jobs, lower unemployment, and reduced electric outages. Read the whole article for all the benefits.

Chattanooga is providing financial assistance to people with technical backgrounds who agree to buy a house and move to the area. It's a brilliant idea, and coupled with their fiber network, Chattanooga continues to prove they are not just serving up the same old warmed over, forty year old economic development strategies.

Here is a brief video produced by Alcatel-Lucent on Chattanooga's fiber initiative. One of the people interviewed is a venture capitalist who has settled in Chattanooga, which is worthy of some notice--lack of capital is one of the biggest problems that many regions face when trying to jump start economic development. Most new jobs are created by small business START UPS, not existing small businesses, and start up businesses need angel and VC capital to create those jobs.

Tennessee legislators just passed a law making it illegal to transmit an image that could "..frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress" to someone who sees it." And the person who suffers "emotional distress" does not have to be the person you sent it to. Suppose you send out a picture of a cat hanging desperately from the branch of tree to a friend. That friend forwards it on.

The City of Chattanooga, Tennessee was recently selected by the Intelligent Community Forum as one of the Top 7 Intelligent Communities worldwide for 2011. This article by Robert Bell of ICF provides some of the back story and the amazing success of Chattanooga over the past couple of decades.

Via the excellent Community Broadband Networks, the City of Chattanooga's Electric Power Board is going to roll out fiber-delivered Internet as part of the utility's triple play services (voice, video, and Internet). Customers will be able to purchase symmetric Internet access packages with speeds up to 150 megabit/second (again, symmetric).

Tennessee legislators have done a very simple and very smart thing. They have passed legislation that allows small electric cars with limited speed (e.g. up to 35 mph) travel on roads where the posted speed limit is 40 mph.